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The Night By Elie Wiesel

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In Night by Elie Wiesel, the author reflects on his own experience of being separated from his family and eventually his own religion. This separation was not by any means voluntary, they were forced apart during the Holocaust. Wiesel was a Jew when the invasion of Hungary occurred and the Germans ripped members of his religion away from their home in Sighet. A once peaceful community where Wiesel learned to love the Kabbalah was now home to only dust and lost memories. Most members of that Jewish community were never to return, hell greeted them with open arms as they walked through the now rusty gates of Auschwitz. In order to survive unimaginable circumstances that were enforced in these camps, a boy had to hang on to his humanity. But by no means did humanity stay with the boy, being subjected to the horror of concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel saw first-hand how members of other communities attempt to silence opposing voices. All of the pain that Wiesel saw inspired him to keep watch and tell stories for people who wouldn’t live on to tell them for their own families. Stories are what keeps a person alive and through Eliezer’s words that he puts down many are able to get a sense of closure in knowing what occurred at these camps. One story occurred on the first train ride away from home, a lady named Madame Schächter was beaten up for crying out against imminent death, unseen by others. She stayed like that all through the day, dumb, absent,

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