Struggle for Freedom

Elie’s faith in humanity starts disappearing on his first day at the camp. “Was I still alive? Was I awake? How was it possible that men, women, and the children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare perhaps…”(32). Elie’s thought was that if thousands of people were being murdered each day that someone was bound to notice. No one would let a genocide happen right in front of them and not do

Everyone “good” can do no wrong and everyone “bad” does everything wrong. That doesn’t happen in “Night”. We see multiple scenes in this story where because we are directly in the thoughts of the protagonist, we have an understanding of the motive behind Elie’s actions, whether it was for his own benefit or not. An example of this was when Elie was offered to get into a good Kommando, stay with his father, and other benefits just for his shoes. Elie refuses, thinking, “I refused to give him my shoes. They were all I had left.” (Wiesel, page 48) He later loses his shoes anyway, but gets absolutely nothing from it. From this scene, we see a moment where Elie’s psyche is especially weak, allowing us to better connect, relate, understand him as well as the

​ Cruelty. Faith. Survival. In the memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie, his family, and other Jews are tricked into concentration camps and made prisoners. Here they are treated cruelly, and struggle to survive. This marks the beginning of the Holocaust for Elie but the end for a endless amount of others. When life was normal, Eli had a strong belief in god but as the conditions become less bearable he starts to question his faith and ultimately loses it.

During the course of the slave trade millions of Africans became involuntary immigrants to the New World. Some African captives resisted enslavement by fleeing from slave forts on the coast of West African. Others mutinied on board slave trading vessels, or cast themselves into the ocean, rather facing death than enslavement. In the New World there were those who ran away from their owners, ran away among the Indians, formed maroon societies, revolted, feigned sickness, or participated in work slow downs. Some sought and succeeded in gaining liberty through various legal means such as "good service" to their masters, self-purchase, or military service. Still others seemingly acquiesced and learned to survive in

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

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

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

At the beginning of Night, Elie has a good and well-off life. He is not poor and lives comfortably with his family in Sighet, Transylvania. He may not have everything he wants, but he has what he needs. This changes overnight when Elie and the other Jews of Sighet are deported out of their ghetto and into concentration camps. The Nazis take everything from Elie, his family, name, hair, personal possessions, and confidence in his faith. Suddenly, Elie finds he is no longer the son of a well-respected Jewish community leader who has everything he needs, but rather a prisoner with no possessions or home to call his own. In minutes, he has lost everything and now finds himself in a camp where he owns just a bowl, shoes, and the clothes on his back. He doesn’t even have his own bed; that too he must share with others. “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust” (Wiesel, 32). At this point, Elie has realized that the life he knew before was gone. He also probably wished he had appreciated something as simple as his name, as once he was in the camp, “I became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (Wiesel, 39). He even wished he had appreciated his sheets before the war, saying “They put me into a bed with white sheets. I had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel, 74). All of Elie’s realizations of how good his life had been while in Sighet didn’t come until he had lost all the things he took for granted. Prior to his deportation, Elie was just like any other teenager. While he may know that he has a good life and has everything he needs, he usually doesn’t acknowledge or appreciate it. Most teenagers and adults alike take for granted their ability to provide for their needs. They don’t think about the event that

Before Elie had been deported to the terrors of the Auschwitz, he was a completely different person. Some of the traits that he exhibited were hopeful, shielded, and religious. As Wiesel said in “Night” “There was joy, yes joy. People must have thought there could be no greater torment in God’s hell than that of being stranded here, on the sidewalk, among the bundles, in the middle of the street under the blazing sun.” (16) The town was not concerned about what was going on. They didn't believe that anything else would get worse. Elie and the people of his town were unable to accept the fact that anyone would do such a horrible deed. Elie and his neighbors were ecstatic because they thought nothing could get worse than it was already; what Hitler would do to them in the future, did not even seen imaginable. The victims believed that God would

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

Within human nature there is a want to act against the corruption and evils of society. A human’s moral compass directs each person to fight against what is considered evil and to praise everything that is believed to be good. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (The Devil Came on Horseback). This means that in order for humans to rise above the evils of the world, good men have to take action against those who have committed a wrong. “Not a cry of distress, not a groan, nothing but a mass agony, in silence.”(pg.84). Due to Elie and the other Jews submission to the powerful Nazis, the dehumanization of the Jews remained

The Holocaust was a terrifying experience for all making the scary darkness of night similar to the Holocaust. You can see darkness in, "That night, the soup tasted of corpses." (Wiesel 65) Elie is surrounded by death, he seemed to crave it but he isn't phased. They witnessed a hanging, the hanging of a young boy whose dead eyes still had a flicker of light when dangling. He had to watch this small boy have the life and childhood stolen from him. Nighttime has always been home to tall tales of monsters, but Elie's monsters are right in front of him. When someone would think of the Holocaust they would think of a dark time, death, sadness, horrific images, and all things along the line of bad. Witnessing a hanging of such a small boy puts almost a scent of death in the air. Nighttime is often feared by children, it's a dreaded time for them, they don't want to be in a dark room alone. The nighttime and darkness of the sky brings a natural fear to people. Similar to the horrors of the

The Jews in the Holocaust watched their families and loved ones get slaughtered every day, leading the victims to become numb and indifferent to what was going on around them. Elie began to lose hope after seeing so much cruelty and thought, “Indifference deadened the spirit. Here or elsewhere- what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was so long and never ending” (93). Elie gave up hope in himself, which is just as lethal as an angry Nazi, for truly believing you are incapable of something is the most belittling and dehumanizing thought of all. Not only did the Jews become numb to the violence, but the belief that it was wrong to act out violently against the Jews never crossed the Nazis’ minds. After routinely murdering numerous Jews who were “un-human” in the minds of the Nazis and Germans, the perpetrators began to believe with every fiber in their beings that what they were doing was for the world’s benefit. One day in the camps,

A tragic event can change someone’s life forever in a good way or a bad way. The holocaust shaped people's lives into a way where they can never go back. In “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, changed as a person due to his experiences at Auschwitz. Elie was a victim of the holocaust and it changed his life forever as a person and a Jew.

In Night Elie shares the horrific experiences as he is taken from his home and goes to Auschwitz where he is brutalized by Nazis. Elie lost his youth and began to doubt his faith (“Entering the Night”). Elie was given an insufficient amount of food and water, forced to work for long amounts of time, and punished for crimes he did not commit (“Night”). All of Elie’s suffering in the concentration camps during the Holocaust was because of a man named Adolf Hitler. Hitler used his powerful position to try and get rid of the Jewish population. When people became unemployed and Hitler wanted to be reelected, he used the Jews as scapegoats and blamed problems on them. Then, he put people