The Theme Of Survival In Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.

From the time where Elie had to decide to fight for his father’s life, to the time where he questioned his beliefs, Elie has had to make many life-changing decisions. As some of his decisions left negative consequences, some were left a positive outcome. In the end, all the decisions Elie had made in the camps has made his life miserable or at its best. For better or for worse, the events that Elie encountered makes his life unforgettable as realizes there was more to life than he had thought of

Although there are many different stories about the holocaust, Elie Wiesel's story is very vivid and full of the jarring reality of his experiences. He doesn’t hold back any of the cruelness and torment he was forced to endure as an adolescent. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses repetition, imagery, and symbolism to illustrate the deprivation of his former self during his traumatic experiences during his time in the Nazi work camp.

The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them under the most extreme conditions.

Elie Wiesel experienced many personal and social conversions. One theme that relates to everyone throughout the novel Night, is freedom v.s confinement. In the beginning of this nonfiction story, Elie and his family are arranged in a ghetto in their town. The author introduces this by saying, “Two ghettos were set up in Sighet. A large one, in the center of the town, occupied four streets, and another smaller one extended over several small side streets in the outlying district. The street where we lived, Serpent Street, was inside the first ghetto.” The idea of confinement is now being constructed. Within the ghetto, they are not aware, but this was the last time they would see their homes or a place that gives them full contentment/ satisfaction.

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” (Nietzsche). This quote, said by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, describes the desire to survive that was inside of Elie Wiesel in his story. The book describes Elie’s late teen years when he was sent to a concentration camp by the German government. In the book, he is separated from his whole family except for his old father, and both are put to work inside of the camp. As Elie suffers through the camp, his faith and his life face many tests and trials. There are many instances throughout the book when people die or when somebody loses their faith. The theme of the book Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is survival, as shown by the death of many Jews during the Holocaust, people willing to do anything to survive, and people’s faith not surviving the traumatic experiences of the concentration camps.

The more of the world a person sees, the more he/she realizes that it is not as perfect as he/she thinks it is. When one matures, he/she gains knowledge and experiences that affect how he/she act and think. Their perspective of the world changes either positively or negatively. Night, an autobiographical memoir written by Elie Wiesel, tells of the horrors he faced as a child during the Holocaust. The more the readers read about his experiences, the more they see how his perspectives change throughout the novel. Emily Dickinson's poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” explains how one must conquer his/her fear in order to see more of the world. The way we perceive things change as we gain more knowledge and experience of the world we live in.

In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he shares his story of his experience through World War Two. Through his experiences, he experiences both internal and external conflicts. The conflicts he experienced include ideas of dehumanization, loss, and physical changes.

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

face the threats that lie before us. In Elie Wiesels’s memoir Night, a huge groups of

In the United States today’s violence has increased over the past two years. Many recent violent attacks have been shootings by the police. In 2015 numbers were at 465; but later in 2016 numbers grew to 491 plus 6 percent. In the novel Night, violence plays a tremendous role. German soldiers use violence to force Jews out of their homes and onto the concentration camps. Elie Wiesel and his father encounter many situations when him, his father or both directly or indirectly are exposed to violence.

The book Night by Elie Wiesel is an account of Elie’s experiences in the camps. Many Stories have come out of this period of time; stories of loss, death, as well as ones of survival and human kindness. In Night, Elie’s is a story of survival. “Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.” (Tzu). Survival is made up of the culmination of many factors. For some it is the hope of a better tomorrow, to others, it is a reason in the moment. Sometimes, ones’ survival is of sheer fate as if they were destined for a brighter future. Elie Wiesel’s Night is the story of his survival against odds.

The autobiography Night, begins by describing the main character, Elie Wiesel’s, life before The Holocaust. Wiesel is also the author of this account of a true story. The novel begins in 1941 and is set in the Transylvanian town of Sighet. Wiesel’s family consists of his parents, who’s names are not mentioned in the book, and his three sisters, Hilda, Béa, and Tzipora. They are a strict Orthodox Jewish family and have always followed the traditions and laws associated with being Jewish. His father is held in high regards with Sighet’s Jewish Community. Elie’s family believes strongly in the Talmud, or the Jewish oral law, but, Elie also studies the Cabbala, or Jewish mystical texts, which if not in secrecy, his father would never approve of. Through this learning, he finds, what he calls, his master. He believes Moché the Beadle, “the poor barefoot of Sighet”, as Wiesel refers to him as. Soon after their secret lessons begin, Moché, along with all other foreign Jews in Sighet, are deported. The town seems initially upset in the deportation, but soon everything returns to normal. One day, a few months following Moché’s expulsion, he returns to tell all the people of his personal experience. He describes the concentration camps and horrors he went through before escaping. None of the town’s members believe him and say that all he wants is pity.

The autobiography “Night” by Elie Wiesel explores several ambiguous and dark themes throughout his recount of living through the Holocaust. One of the most complex is the idea that different elements of fear will force groups of people into survival mode, causing them to commit horrendous acts. When anyone is exposed to savagery to the point of survival, they too lose all humanity. Wiesel displays this in both the Germans and Jews, for neither maintain their sense of morality after remaining in the concentration camps. There are several instances in the book where the narrator, Elie Wiesel, observes both sides of the conflict display incredibly inhuman thoughts or actions, and some he experiences for himself.

Because of his denial of God, Elie’s “eyes were open and [he] was alone-terribly alone in a world without God”. He “had ceased to be anything but ashes, yet [he] felt himself to be stronger than the Almighty” (65). Elie feels as if praising God is worthless and doesn’t matter anymore. Although a part of himself is missing, he feels that he’s doing the right thing. He believes he is acting in the right way, despite his realization of the lonely world, without God, that he is in.