Night Reflection

In life, people go through different changes when put through difficult experiences. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is a young Jewish boy whose family is sent to a concentration camp by Nazis. The story focuses on his experiences and trials through the camp. Elie physically becomes more dehumanized and skeletal, mentally changes his perspective on religion, and socially becomes more selfish and detached, causing him to lose many parts of his character and adding to the overall theme of loss in Night.

Originally, Eliezer was a young teenager who was devoted to his religion and was pious. According to the text, Elie explains, “Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (4). Religion was Elie’s way of life and brought him a sense of completeness. Praying and understanding his religion was like breathing, he couldn’t live without it. He dedicated himself to his faith and wanted to follow the same acts as his father who was a known man in their town of Sighet and put other people and his religion before himself. At a young age, Elie wanted to study Kabbalah, which is the deepest insights into God and the purpose of creation. He found his master in a man named Moishe the Beadle. Moishe the Beadle was a master in everything he has done and was an influential person in Elie’s life. For instance, “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him...Man asks and God replies...The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself,”(5). Moshe proved that God is always there to guide you no matter what happens, but sometimes you also have to rely on yourself. Elie was astounded with the way Moishe viewed God and the lessons he was taught. It became a routine for Elie to converse with him. But after Moishe was transported from Sighet for being a foreign Jew, Elie started to have a change of thought. Weisel points out, “One day… I saw Moishe the Beadle… told me what had happened to him and his companions… were forced to dig huge trenches… they [the Gestapo] shot their prisoners… Infants were tossed… and used as targets for the machine guns,” (6). Moishe’s experiences sounded so horrifying that nobody believed him- he was called a fool and liar. Although

When it comes to retaining one’s humanity in the face of suffering a person has the choice to preserve it or not. To elaborate, in the novel, Night, there where instances were the loss of humanity was evident. Such as, when Elie witness the prisoners “instincts of self-preservation, of self-dense, [and] of…[desert them]”(Wiesel 36). And others were the loss of humanity wasn’t evident. Specifically, when Elie gets help from a French woman who states,” Don’t cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day…the day will come but not now” (53). All in all, these instances were what made up the whole story. As they accumulated, the question of whether a person had the ability to retain their humanity or not became apparent and, rather, hard to

Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, Recounts his first-hand experiences of Nazi atrocities in his memoir, Night as Wiesel struggles to maintain faith. Inhumanity and cruelty are two key parts relating to dehumanization in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. Inhumanity and cruelty dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust. This cruelty is important to the theme in this book because this is what the Holocaust is about. This book focuses on the Jews of Sighet because that is where the author Elie is from, the book entails the horrendous story of one Jew and his father out of six million Jews. Cruelty is directly related to this book as a whole because it is basically what the Holocaust is about, Nazi’s and Germans mistreating Jewish people because

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.” Elie and his family just wanted to live a normal life. They didn’t have very much money, but were happy with the state they were in. One day, SS officers showed up and took Elie and his family away. Not knowing where they were going, they were obviously scared. Once they finally got there, they realized what they were in for, and that Moishe the Beadle was right. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, the German Army dehumanizes Elie Wiesel and the rest of the Jewish prisoners by depriving them of love, safety, and physiological needs.

In the novel Night illustrated by Eliezer Wiesel, he describes the process the jews went through during the Holocaust and turns into a descriptive autobiography on how it changed his life forever. Elie’s total life was demolished in concentration camp and he was transformed into this anesthetic tragedy. Eliezer can no longer feel his mother’s reassurance and nurturing either, not that it would even be enough to soothe him after all he’s seen anymore. He undergoes a major change in the novel when all that he knows and values is destroyed, his faith backfires, and his memories are lost (metaphorically speaking); these are the key attributes that make up a person so without them one can’t even know where to begin.

In the book Night, Elie often experiences cruelty but he also experiences kindness. On page 85, Wiesel says, " The SS made us increase our pace. "Faster, you tramps, you flea-ridden dogs!" Why not? Moving fast made us a little warmer. The blood flowed more readily in our veins. We had the feeling of being alive...". This shows that Elie no longer felt like he was alive until he started running. Before he was ordered to run he was at a point where he felt he no longer existed because of how much suffering he was in. After he started to run he now felt the existence of himself because he was running to keep himself alive, because if he would have stopped he would have been killed. He had to dig deep and find a way to keep himself going, he did so because he kept himself going and felt warmer and truly alive. On the other hand, Elie also experiences kindness. On page 53, Wiesel says, “I felt a cool hand wiping the blood from my forehead. It was the French girl. She was smiling her mournful smile as she slipped me a crust of bread”. The way Elie experiences kindness is that after he has been beaten there was a sweet French girl that was comforting him and giving him extra rations of bread when he needed it most. The insight that the Holocaust gave me was that, there can actually be that bad of people in the world to treat someone so badly. I never thought that any person would treat not just one but millions of others in such an awful

“I won’t give you more, more than you can take and I might let you bend, but I won’t let you break.” Elie Wiesel has an unbreakable personality, but he was certainly tested when God put him through the Holocaust with the knowledge that he had the physical and mental strength to get through some miserable times and impact the world with his story. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, experiences great change through his horrific and scarring adventures that he endures at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Although Eliezer survived the bloodcurdling Holocaust, countless others succumbed to the Nazi’s inhumanity. The Nazi’s progressively reduced the Jewish people to being little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place, as the Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Germans dehumanized Eliezer, his father, and other fellow Jews for the duration of the memoir Night, which had a lasting effect on Eliezer’s identity, attitude and outlook. Wiesel displays the Nazi’s vicious actions to accentuate the way by which they dehumanize the Jewish population. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, among other horrific actions.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, showed the devastation of Eliezer’s childhood and illustrated the loss of innocence through the evil of others. Elie Wiesel expressed to us that one’s own faith and beliefs can be challenged through torture and ongoing suffering. The novel, Night, allowed the reader to witness the change in Eliezer from one of an innocent child who strongly adhered to his faith in God into a person who questioned not only his faith and God but of himself as well. The cruelty is shown to him while in the concentration camp forced him to wonder if there was a God and if so why would he put him and the others through such torture. Through his suffering, Eliezer’s beliefs dramatically and negatively changed his faith in God and compelled him to experience a transformative relationship with his father.

Before this however, he has complete control over what he does in life, and it is his choice “of studying Kabbalah” (Wiesel 4). He studies the Talmud and adheres to his parents belief in Orthodox Judaism. During his days Eliezer often goes to prayers and speaks to Moishe about the ways of God. He seems to be fascinated

Most people believe that family helps build you up and make you stronger, even through tragic events; this isn’t always true. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, he explains the hardships he and his father, Shlomo, experienced while in concentration camps. In the book, Elie and his dad went through many tough situations together: starvation, beatings, and health issues. As more and more horrific events occurred, Eliezer's relationship with his father began to fade. As Shlomo grew weaker physically, Eliezer grew weaker emotionally; the intense trauma numbed his heart. Because of these many difficulties, Eliezer was shaped into an independent young man who no longer relied on his family but on his own strength for survival.

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel is a young boy who struggles to survive after being forced to live in the brutal concentration camp of Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, death and suffering is rampant, but due to compassionate words and actions from others, Elie is able to withstand these severe living conditions and overcome the risk of death in the unforgiving Auschwitz. As shown through the actions and words of characters in Night, compassion, the sympathetic pity for the suffering or misfortune of others is critical to the human experience because it enables humans to empathize with each other, empathizing which allows us to feel the need to assist others which can often be vital for survival.

In this eye-opening book, Night by Elie Wiesel, it became very obvious that, not only his view on the world, but his view on others and himself changed dramatically throughout the book. He changed mentally and became stronger in the mind, the things he went through had changed his whole body, leaving scars and showing his rib cage from lack of food, and his beliefs in God and humanity. His human right on how he wanted to grow up was taken from him and instead he was handed the brink of life or death, along with his father, who was constantly on the edge of death. He often questioned the fact that God was on their side, given the fact that he and thousands more were tortured, beaten, and killed everyday. He also questioned why God would want them to go through this; was it to make them stronger people… or did God just want them to suffer?

A life changing situation can happen at any moment, and happen to many people throughout the world. Before Elie was taken to the concentration camp, he had many life altering moments that have changed his life forever.