Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.

The Holocaust was a distressing time in history and is not a story everyone can absorb. Both the book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas written by John Boyne and the film, Life is Beautiful, directed by Robert Benigni, are based upon the real life events of the Holocaust but with a difference. They made clever use of different techniques to dim and censor the reality of the events and interpret it in a more tolerable way. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas depicts the life of a young nine year old boy named Bruno who is the son of the Commandant of the Auschwitz

Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiography about his experience during the Holocaust when he was fifteen years old. Elie is fifteen when the tragedy begins. He is taken with his family through many trials and then is separated from everyone besides his father. They are left with only each other, of which they are able to confide in and look to for support. The story is told through a series of creative writing practices. Mr. Wiesel uses strong diction, and syntax as well as a combination of stylistic devices. This autobiography allows the readers to understand a personal, first-hand account of the terrible events of the holocaust. The ways that diction is used in Night helps with this understanding.

One of the main themes throughout the book is the title of the book “Night”. There are references from Eliezer about night during the book, which are full of symbolism. The word “night” is used repeatedly, and Eliezer recounts every dusk, night and dawn through the entire book. For instance, Night could be a metaphor for the Holocaust—submerge the family and thousands of Jewish families in the darkness and misery of the concentration camps.

Therefore Elie shows how the prisoners of the Holocaust went through all different shapes and kinds of cruelty. They were forced to do things that did not want to do and go places they did not want to go because there was a threat of survival. The men and women who were imprisoned in the camp got barely enough food to survive and sometimes when days without any food or water. The cruelty shown by the SS men and women shaped how people thought and acted around

At the beginning of the memoir, Elie describes the extent of psychological abuse that he is subjected to, and already the reader can sense a theme of darkness. The atrocious cruelty showed by Nazi soldiers toward Jews, is beyond all realms of rationality. Through strategic verbal abuse, Nazi soldiers slowly deprive the Jews of their stimulus and ability to react. The author reveals, “Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog…The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us” (Wiesel 36). This daily psychological pressure is intended to extinguish any trace of humanity in Jews. The Nazi soldiers know that if they deprive the Jews of their innate nature and interests in life, it would be easier to instill fear and exponentially erase hope. The author affirms, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would had dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?” (39). In this section of the memoir, Elie underscores the Nazis’ success in creating a mental paralysis and an incapacity to react to injustice. The Nazis are using one of the most invasive forms of torture, the psychological abuse. They are progressing every day in their brutal plan, and consequently, the Jews’ anguish becomes more intense and precise. Caleb Lewis in

The Holocaust was a very terrible time in history over six million Jews perished in concentration camps. Even though in every tragedy there are survivors. Elie Wiesel was a little boy when all of this happened. He experienced all of the terrible things that happened during this time frame. While suffering in the terrible condition of the camp Elie and his father’s relationship goes through a drastic change.

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

Death camps-A very heart wrenching subject. As a young boy, Elie had to experience the pain and suffering that was considered “normal” in a concentration camp. Death become just death, people became numb, life went on until one day you couldn’t go on and were then sent to the crematorium. Survival was a huge aspect in the book ‘Night’. The daily rations were a piece of stale bread and some soup. As time went on rations got less and people began to get ravenous. As stated in the text “You’re killing your father…I have bread…for you too…for you too…” (Wiesel 101) The theme of survival relates not to just this book and the Holocaust, but in the real world. It is our humanly instincts to stay alive. Once that factor kicks in you start to lose sight of what matters in your life, like happiness and relationships. That’s why on page 101 the boy killed his father for just

In Elie’s story, it mostly focuses on his view and what is happening just to him. “During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, so close to death, and yet I had abandoned him.” (page 106) said Elie. Elie started to only think about himself and not his loved ones. While Life is Beautiful shows what happens to all of the characters. Elie’s story begins very close to the beginning of the Holocaust, Guido’s story before the Holocaust takes up half of the movie.

When people look at two extremely different stories such as Night and Life is Beautiful, they would not expect there to be many similarities. However, these two devastating tales are more alike than suspected. Both Night and Life is Beautiful may be two accounts of the holocaust, but that does not mean that they bring the same thing to the table. They both may include a somewhat similar father-son relationship, yet they still aren’t that same. Night, a tragic memoir of Eliezer Wiesel, and Life is Beautiful, a humorous and still somewhat depressing movie of Guido and his family, have numerous similarities as well as drastic differences between them.

The conditions in the camps were so terrible that they drove the poor Jews who lived through it into madness. One such survivor published his experiences in a book entitled Night. Elie Weisel, the book's author, reports of conditions so horrible that he lost his faith and his sense of humanity. Weisel and his

While Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy subjugated to the violence of the Holocaust in Night, embarks on his atrocious journey in struggling to survive the brutality perpetrated on him, he loses his innocence in the traumatic circumstances. Wiesel’s main aspiration of writing about his development from childhood to adulthood is to showcase how cruelty within society can darken innocents’ souls. As Elie grows throughout the story, he starts to understand that he has changed from a pure, little child to a young man filled with distress and thoughts of danger. He reflects over what kind of individual he has evolved into because of the all the killings and torture he has witnessed: “I too had become a different

This book interested me because it is a great example of what so many people went through in concentration camps throughout Europe in World War II. So many books have been written about personal accounts of war hardships suffered by the Jews but so few capture the true problems faced by prisoners. The impossible decision between survival and family was a difficult one faced by many during this time. Elie had an unfaltering will to live when his father was alive with him but once his father died the reason for living disappeared. But he once was faced with the decision of helping to keep his father alive or let him die and have an extra ration of food. How can one be stuck with a decision like this and not choose survival? Only true unselfishness can cause you to help someone

“The opposite of love is not hate but indifference,” Elie Weisel stated after commenting on his thoughts on racism and his years surviving the Holocaust. Weisel was thrown in and out of concentration camps starting at the age of fifteen until finally his final camp where his father had died was liberated. The tragedies that Weisel along with the other millions of people who suffered were unimaginable and even Weisel himself strived for years to find words that somewhat explained what their experience was like. However, no one will ever be able to fully express what It is truly like to live during such racist times, whether it be through writing or film.