Personal Narrative: Elie

“Never give up hope, no matter how dark things seem” -Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: the Clone Wars. In the beginning of the story Elie is hopeful at every turn. He has a bright, hopeful future and then he and his family are taken away. When they are in the ghetto Elie is hopeful that he and his family won’t have to leave. He hopes he and his family will be okay. However his hope is taken away from him. He and his family arrive and they take his group near a crematorium. Elie is hopeful that he and his father won’t be taken into the crematorium’s deadly fire. But when he gets inside the camp he wishes that he would have been killed by the deadly fire. Later on in the story Elie meets his Uncle Stein. His Uncle asks him how his wife and sons are doing. Elie doesn’t have a clue but lies and says they are okay. This renews Uncle Stein’s faith but later on his village comes to the camp and Stein discovers that they died a long time ago. This news crushed Stein and he died days later. He lost his hope. Elie watches this scene unravel and hopes that he won’t lose his last bit of hope, his father. However he would soon lose him. “No! I yelled. He’s(Elie’s dad) not dead! Not yet!” Elie on page 93 in Night. Elie’s last bit of hope, his only reason for living, is his father. His father slowly starts to fade away and Elie can’t let him die, because then he’ll be dead soon after. However what happened in their relationship might have been worse than him just dying. One day when he, his father, and a group of other prisoners are being transported. The prison guards began to throw bread in their transport and then men began fighting to the death. Elie watches a son attempt to

When Elie and his family are sent to a concentration camp, he is fortunate enough to not be separated from his father. At first, this is a relief, and is father is his will to survive. “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot… My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. He was running next to me, out of breathe, out of strength, desperate. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.”(86)

A saying i've kept to myself is to get back up when knocked down. This saying doesn’t just stand for getting up when literally knocked down but can keep a deeper meaning than what it says as for example being knocked down by a difficult obstacle to overcome and getting up to find a way to get past it and achieving it. Some people may not see this as something important but they don’t think about how getting up after knocked down can be something that can or would have been like a positive outcome into their life and how they are given two choices when knocked down which is to stay down or get back up and continue going forward.

In one of the short paragraphs, Elie told a little boy not to cry. "Don't cry, Yehiel," I said. "Don't waste your tears …" "Not cry? We're on the threshold of death. Soon, we shall be inside…Do you understand? Inside. How could I not cry?" I watched darkness fade through the bluish skylights in the roof.

Emphasizing the word ‘me,’ Elie shows himself gradually being consumed by the mindset of ‘every man for himself.’ He worries about his safety more than his father’s pain, and this continues after the officer leaves. His father called out to him again but Elie didn’t move, even when the officer disappeared, he only looked at his father, no aim to help his father and finally returns to his bunk to sleep. When he awoke the following day, his father was gone and Elie states, “deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! …,” (112). Here, Elie admits that somewhere deep down inside him, he felt released from the responsibility of looking after his father, although pained by his death, relieved of a burden. Deep down he harbored the feeling that his father was just another thing to add to the list of his trouble and

:After witnessing his friend’s death, Elie started to let the idea of death consume his thoughts to the point that, if his father had not been by his side serving as motivation, he would have died that night during the march. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me, It stuck to me like glue.”

The book Night opens in the town of Signet where Elie Wiesel, the author ,

This quote is making you feel for Elie and his father because you want to have pity on his father but you also want to feel the way Elie does because his father has caused him so much pain.

“I woke from my apathy only when two men approached my father. I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying... At last, my father half opened his eyes” (99). Elie almost lost the one thing that kept him going, his father. He had gone all this way, enduring so many different trials and awful things. He was not going to let his father give up now like most of the other people around them. Elie would not let him be like the other ones that were thrown off. “In a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb” (99). Elie was not going to abandon his father like

As Elie’s life continues he endures more tests that at his age majority of the people would not have experienced. Elie's father was suffering from dysentery and other maladies. On the night of January 28th in 1945, Elie goes to his bunk in exhaustion with his father still alive and in the bunk below him, “I had to go to sleep. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. The date was January 28, 1945”(112). In the morning, Elie wakes up to a new person in the bed where his father had laid. Elie realizes that he has no emotion left to show, especially not sympathy, “I

“I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever” (Wiesel 29). At this time, an SS officer is introducing, what will eventually become, a familiar fear of separation. This separation created the inevitability of separation amongst families. Once parted from his mother and sister, Elie immediately grasped his father’s hand so that he would not lose him next. As Elie’s father became weak and incapable, Elie began to lose him. Men would beat him out of jealousy because his illness justified his inability to work outside. Elie not being able to revive his emaciated, ill father angered him to the point where he felt that he could no longer reach God. “Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore” (Wiesel 113). By this time, Elie had changed so much- he had taken the popular advice of doing what the German’s ordered. When his father was being poorly treated, he wished he could have been able to lift a hand on the Kapo, but he knew that they would have stricken back. Since Elie regretfully failed to help his father, he thought God would step in. However, not being able to help Elie’s father, God proved to be an unreliable partner. Elie

* “Elie even gave his dying father extra rations, despite being told to “stop giving your ration of bread and soup too your old father... in fact you should be getting his rations.”

Then, throughout the middle of the novel, the strength of family bonds of the Jews is tested. After the run, a Rabbi asks Elie if he had seen his son, Elie tells him that he had not. Then Elie realizes that he had seen his son on the run, but he does not tell the Rabbi because his son left him behind on purpose. The text states, “He had felt his father growing weaker… by this separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival” (Wiesel 91). This is where the reader begins to see the toll that the concentration camps are having on the families. Elie includes this to show, that now, family members see each other as burdens rather than a blessing. Later in the novel, family members go as far as taking a life. One old man

Elie’s thoughts and actions reflect his reliance on his father in the camp. When he is going through selection for a komodo, he begs, “I want to stay with my father” page 48.

Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in the town of Sighet in Transylvania, which is located in Romania. His parents, Shlomo Wiesel and Sarah Feig had three other children not including Elie. The three other siblings were his sisters Hilda, Bea, Tsiporah. Wiesel and his family primarily were an Orthodox Jewish family. When he was very young he started to study Hebrew and the Bible. He mostly focused on his religious studies. According to the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, “He was fifteen years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz.” During the time they spent at Auschwitz, Elie’s mother and younger sister didn’t make it, but his two older sisters were fortunate enough to survive. “Elie and his