Silence In Night By Elie Wiesel

God challenges people in times of hardships, however, it depends on the person if they can take upon the challenge and keep faith in God. Eliezer Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author of the memoir Night, is one of these people who have to take this test. Elie demonstrates faith is tested in times of trouble through the use of character relation, change in setting and the conflicts that he witnesses.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

Gabriella Gutierrez Mr. Gonzales English 9 4/24/24 Night Essay About 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. 6 million people died because everyone that had the chance to help and to change what was happening, but they all were bystanders and didn’t do anything to help. Night is a book about a Holocaust survivor named Elie Wiesel. In this book Elie writes about his experience in the concentration camps, what it was like during that time and what he went through. Many people have died from that event in history, so now it is our obligation to report on behalf of ourselves and others bad actions.

Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on giving the reader a precise understanding of the Holocaust from the perspective of a man who endured it. In order to vividly describe the situation, Wiesel uses specific words or phrases to signify the importance and value behind it. Wiesel writes, “Night. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes” (Wiesel 21). “Night” is used abundantly throughout the book. In today’s American society, night is for rejuvenation, peace,

It is the belief of God’s silence the Wiesel finds most infuriating. The written representation of an event at the Buna concentration camp reveals that as the Gestapo hang a young boy, a man in the crowd asks, “Where is merciful God, where is he?” (64). The only response to the man’s cry for help is complete and utter silence throughout the camp. Elie and his fellow prisoners question how an all – knowing, all – powerful God could allow these horrors and terrors to be ensued upon such

Night is an account of the Holocaust and persecution of the Jewish people, written by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel wrote, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky” (Night). Remembering the events of the Holocaust and the atrocities that occurred are a major theme of the book . The events of the Holocaust were unforgettable to Elie Wiesel and even on the first day, he saw children being burned. Throughout the book this is not the only atrocity that he saw.

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.

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

In a Concentration Camp survival was next to impossible. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is a survivor of the holocaust who doesn’t have much of a relationship with his father. He has always felt that he was never important to his father and that his father cared more about the community than his own family. When Eliezer and his father are forced to count on each other, it’s a slow process for them to finally have a father-son relationship. Without each other they wouldn’t have survived for as long as they did and Eliezer would have lost all hope. A major theme in this story is how Eliezer and his father come together and build a relationship amidst their circumstances.

There are many important themes and overtones to the book Night, by Eliezer Wiesel. One of the major themes from the book includes the protagonist, and author of his memoire, Elie Wiesel’s ever changing relationship with God. An example of this is when Moche the Beadle asked Elie an important question that would change his life forever, as the basis of his passion and aptitude for studying the ancient texts and teachings of Judaism, “When Moche the Beadle asked Elie why he prayed, Elie couldn 't think of an answer that truly described his faith, and thought, "a strange question, why did I live, why did I breathe?" (Wiesel 14).

Though faithful as they enter the horrific camps of Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buna, Birknau, Dachau, and Buchenwald, the Jews become capricious. They start losing grip and begin falling down the slippery slope of death the Germans set up for them as more horrors of the camps become unveiled. Soon after arriving in the camp and being told about the crematoria, he felt “anger rising with me [Elie]. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent” (33). This is the first time that his faith is challenged. After a few days in Auschwitz he “had ceased to pray. I [Elie] was not denying His existence, but doubted His absolute justice” (45). As seen, Elie is beginning to have doubts about God and therefore his belief and faith in him. Finally, when Elie is looking for God to come though he doesn’t and he asks,

Forty-two years after entering the concentration camp for the first time, Elie Wiesel remarked, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope” (Nobel Lecture 1). This means a lot from someone who endured almost two years of the terror in the WWII concentration camps. During these two years, Elie endured the sadness of leaving his former life and faith behind, the pain of living off of scraps of bread, and the trepidation of the “selections”, where he almost lost his father. He watched the hanging of innocent people, was beat by Kapos and guards time after time, and marched in a death march right after having a foot surgery. Through all of this, he survived because he remained hopeful. Hope was all the Jewish people

After nearly 2 years of misery, anguish, and despair, a young boy is finally freed to a normal life he had almost forgotten existed. Elie had started to become accustomed to the fact that indifference would be what decides if he survived in the concentration camps or not. In the novel, Wiesel employs the motif of silence to illustrate that silence from the Jews represents the fear, apathy, and the absence of God which results in them constantly feel hopeless and are mentally defeated.

I feel like the book Night lets off a very sad a depressing mood. The setting of this book is a various amount of concentration camps that Elie and his dad go to. The main central idea of Night is to explain the experiences in the Holocaust. I personally think that this book is a good book for young adults and not kids because it uses some language and it’s very descriptive.

One common theme all the passages share is speaking up can help out in situations. In this situation, the holocaust, speaking up would have helped a lot. When the soldiers came to get the Jews, if they would have all stuck together maybe things would have happened differently. The result of no one speaking up led to some inhumane things & lots of murder. The executions were all horrible & im pretty sure they were horrible to watch.