Night Elie Wiesel Changes

Have you ever had an event where you, or someone you know, became a completely different person because of certain experiences? Many victims of the Holocaust personalities were changed because of the traumatizing experiences they had to go through in the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel’s personality definitely changed during his ordeal. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, changed in many ways throughout the book because of the different experiences and sights he had to go through in Auschwitz.

Elie’s physical changes throughout the story are best displayed on page 115: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed has never left me” (Wiesel 115). This quote is taken from the end

Elie has lots of character traits that helped him get through Auschwitz, such as resourceful, traitor, and determined. In Night, Elie states “I went back a week later. With the same excuse: I still was not feeling better” (52). Elie came up with excuses to get out of getting his gold crown out. He got resourceful and came up with the idea to keep making an excuse that he was not feeling well, until they got a new doctor and he got to keep his gold crown. He used what he already had to get more out of people later and use his tooth as an advantage. Not only was he resourceful but he was also a traitor. Elie just let his father die and his father was still breathing yet he didn’t move.“My father groaned once more, I heard: ‘Eliezer…’ I could see that he was still breathing- in gaps. I didn’t move” (Wisel 111). He just let his father died and didn’t even try to help him and he died and his last words were “Eliezer…”, but he is thinking for his own future and if he will live or not. He betrayed and was a traitor to his father and didn’t even say goodbye. He was also very determined on living as said by Elie in the expert from his book, “‘Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget you are in a

In the book, our narrator, Elie, is constantly going through changes, and almost all of them are due to his time spent in Auschwitz. Prior to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie was a very different boy, he had a more optimistic outlook on life. During the first few pages of the book, Elie tells us a bit about how he viewed the world before deportation, “ I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” ( 3). Elie was, as he says himself, deeply observant and devoted most of his time to his faith. He spent almost all of his time studying and worshiping. At this point, Elie’s faith is the center of his life. Elie is also shown to do a few other things and has a few more early character traits aside from being dedicated to what he believes in. Elie also sees the best of people, a few pages later he says, “The news is terrible,’ he said at last. And then one word: ‘transports’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely… ‘Where will they take us?” (Wiesel 14). This is one of the only time we hear about Elie being worried or scared because of the Germans before Auschwitz, and still, despite the warnings that were given and the rumors circulating, Elie doesn’t think that the Germans are actually going to do all of those terrible things. Around this time in the book, Wiesel starts to become more emotionally weighted, but none of what has happened takes full effect until much later. There are multiple instances in the book where Elie is given reason to distrust or even hate the Germans, he talks about how the Gestapo treated him and his family on page 19 “‘Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!’ the Hungarian police were screaming.”. Yet he then goes on to say, on that very same page, that “Still our first

For example, he begins to think why would God put him through the torture and bad things that he has been through. Before, Elie believed and was very interested in his religion (Judaism). His view on his God and his religion changed because of things Elie saw, the things Elie experienced, and the things Elie thought and did. Beliefs and religion is something that is hard to manipulate and change one's feelings towards. The Holocaust had extreme effects on Elie, and which will also influence his future generations, which not only affects just Elie but the whole world because of people's beliefs towards mankind and

In the story Elie was whipped savagely by the Kapo, and all he can think about is his father. Later in the new camp Elie's father is giving up on life and Elie tries to make him move. There is an allied air raid and for the first time Elie leave his father.(wiesel pg. 106) This proves he finally gave up on his father. He started off in the story really caring about his father sacrificing his own safety just so he could stay close to him. After his father was struck ill in the new camp he gave up on him. In the story Elie wanted to keep his shoes even if that meant he would get tormented even more. This show he has a very strong will and loves things that give him a glimmer of hope. At the end when his father died he stopped caring and lost all hope in surviving the

The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of love. Elie, along with most of the other people in the camps, aren’t really accepted socially by anyone. They weren’t accepted as a person, and no one even knew them by their names; furthermore, they were known by the number they had tattooed on their arms. On page 42, Elie says “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” By having their names taken away, the Jewish people had their social acceptance stripped from them. Also, their families were taken away from them, and they had to do whatever they could to stay with them. As Elie said on page 30, “My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone.” By separating the Jews from their families, they lost the love from them. By depriving the jews of social acceptance and their families, they hardly felt any

In the beginning he was horrified of the things he saw. On his first day at a concentration camp Elie saw babies being thrown into large pits of fire, people being taken to the crematory and Jews being hit and beaten for no reason. As time past and Wiesel was moved from camp to camp he started to only care about his survival and the horrible things done by the Nazi’s became apart of his everyday life.He saw a boy whose face he said looked like the face of an angel being hung. The little boy struggled to breathe for over thirty minutes before the life in his eyes faded away. Wiesel's own father was beaten because he was sick and not given the proper medical care from the nazi’s. Days later his father was taken to the crematory. Instead of Wiesel being sad he was relieved that he no longer had to take care of his father. Elie lost friends family and saw many more being killed. Wiesel was almost numb to the things happening around him.

Before Elie went to Auschwitz, he exhibited many positive character traits. (Such as Compassion, Depressed, and Friendly. An example of compassion that Elie showed before was on page 5 that said, “And Moishe the Beadle, the poorest of the poor of Sighet, spoke to me for hours on end about the Kabbalah’s revelations and its mysteries. Thus began my initiation. Together we would read, over and over against, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart but to discover within the very essence of divinity”(Wiesel). How he shows compassion is, Elie treats a man of lower social status with kindness, and the man repays him with studies of the Zohar. So a random act of kindness, could pay off someday, you never know. The next example of how Elie showed traits before Auschwitz was depression on page 10, “The Bible commands us to rejoice during the eight days of Passover, but our hearts were not in it. We wished the holiday would end so as not to have to pretend”(Wiesel 10). Elie was so depressed and scared, that

The holocaust is a time where people threw Jews out of their home and started killing them, for no reason. The book Night by Elie Wiesel is about a Jewish family getting sent to a concentration camp. The Wiesel family only knows one house. They get thrown out of their own house, sent on a long journey, just to be set up to die. But, out of a family the family, only 1 survives. But, he has to go through the time of thinking of that his family had died. Family is something many people take advantage of, but Elie now understands that family is important because he lost his Mom and sister at an early age, his father died before he got to say goodbye, and when you lose family members, you have thoughts that there is no reason to do anything.

Furthermore, while still in Auschwitz and after he was liberated, Elie started to reveal the side of him that acclaimed many negative character traits. First of all, toward the end of the book, Elie was nonchalant and numb toward all the terrible things that happened at Auschwitz, “Very close to us stood the tall chimney of the crematorium’s furnace. It no longer impressed us. It barely drew our attention” (Wiesel 104). After moving to a new camp, Elie was unphased by seeing the new crematoriums. Now that Elie and his father were transported to the new camp, they are unfazed by everything that they see. The things they witness would shock most people, but Elie and his father are used to it. This proves that Elie changed after experiencing Auschwitz, he went from being shocked every time he saw something new at the camp, to barely even noticing those things. In addition, Elie also becomes very disinterested and apathetic after he arrived to Auschwitz, “Suddenly the evidence overwhelmed me: there was no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight” (Wiesel 99). Based on the evidence he had, Elie believed his father was dead. Throughout the whole book, Elie has been staying with his father and keeping them

At the young age of 15, Elie was forcibly moved into a ghetto and soon after taken to a concentration camp. Human minds do not fully develop until a person reaches about 25 years of age. (Sandra Aamodt, Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years, National Public Radio) Comprehending the Holocaust is impossible for anyone, which makes it that much more unimaginable and unbelievable to a child. It is quite simple for one to lose sight of himself when faced with a scene of pure death. It is fair to say that most people will do anything in return to live a while longer with loved ones. Therefore, morals are thrown out the window and traded

Before Elie went to the concentration camps, he had many good character traits such as loyalty, Religious, and Impatient. For Example, on page 33, it says “If that is true then I don’t want to wait. I’ll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames” (Wiesel). During this part of the book, Elie and his dad had just arrived at Auschwitz and were being put in a line that was leading to death. Nevertheless, this shows that he is being impatient because he was facing death head on and knew that he might die so he was choosing a quick death rather than burning and slowly dying. Another trait Elie showed before the concentration camp was loyalty. For instance, on page 36, Elie stated “Please sir I’d like to be by my father” (Wiesel). In this part of the book Elie and his family were being separated at the camp and Elie lied about his age so he could stay with his dad. In contrast Elie showed loyalty to his dad by not going with his mom and sister and staying with his dad. This was a very big decision by Elie because he chose the hard way by staying with his dad even if that meant death.

Before Elie went to the Concentration camp, he had many good character traits. On page 31 - 32 Wiesel states, “The wind of revolt died down. We continued to walk until we came to a crossroads. Standing in the middle of it was, though I didn't know it then, Dr. Mengele, the notorious Dr. Mengele. He looked like the typical SS officer: a cruel, though not unintelligent, face, complete with monocle. He was holding a conductor's baton and was surrounded by officers. The baton was moving constantly, sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left”… “This conversation lasted no more than a few seconds. It seemed like an eternity.” In this part of the book Elie had just gotten to the camp and is getting sorted by the angel of death. This part of the text showed that Elie was brave because Elie had just talked to a man who had killed hundreds of people, and he never said he was scared or acted like he was frightened. Another trait he had before he changed was that he was hard working. One example of that trait is on page 50, “Sitting on the ground, we counted bolts, bulbs, and various small electrical parts.” In this part of the book after they got

The Jewish Holocaust was a traumatic event that took place from the early 1930s to the mid 1940s. During the Holocaust, the Germans believed that they had racial authority among other civilians. Under the rule of Adolf Hitler, the Nazis targeted Jews and other groups due to their perceived "racial inferiority". For instance, they persecuted Jews, Gypsies, Elderly, Mentally Disabled, and Homosexuals (etc.) because they believed that they did not portray the behavior of the so-called “social norms”. They were sent to concentration camps and killing camps, to be starved or even beaten to death. This was the cause of death of approximately 6,000,000 Jews. The actions that the Germans took against these innocent people were inhuman. The book, Night, was written by Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. At the time, Elie was just a fifteen year old boy, living in a small town with his family. He aspired to have great knowledge of his Jewish religion. However, by the year 1944, he was taken from his home and separated from his mother and three sisters to be deported to several camps, along with his father. Throughout his journey, his admiration for his religion severely weakened, and he began to question if there really was a God looking after him. He witnessed the burning alive of “imperfect” men, women and children, hangings of those who disobeyed orders, and the death of his poor father. Himself, he suffered through consciously extracting his teeth with rusted