Unbroken Short Story

Well-known nonfiction author Laura Hillenbrand, in her best-selling biography, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, describes the chilling reality faced by those living in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. As the title suggests, this is not the typical World War II tale of hardship that ends in liberation; rather, it follows the main character, Louis “Louie” Zamperini, through his childhood, Olympic performances, and military career leading up to his captivity, as well as his later marriage and many years of healing. Hillenbrand's purpose is to impress upon her readers the scale of this tragedy as well as remind them of the horror that so many nameless soldiers endured. She adopts an emotional yet straightforward tone in order to get readers to sympathize with the characters and truly understand what they went through. To do so, she manages to make the unique story of one man represent the thousands of others going through the same tragedy.

The book Night is a story of family, religion, violence, and hope. This book tells the story of Elie Wiesel’s journey through the holocaust. During the novel, Wiesel writes with the purpose of teaching us several lessons. This lesson is conveyed through Wiesel’s actions, other character’s actions, as well as quotations. The lesson Wiesel taught in Night is to persevere and never lose hope up no matter how hopeless the situation may seem.

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a boy named Elie explains his experiences throughout the Holocaust. His family and other Jews were expelled from Sighet and ended up in a concentration camp in Auschwitz. During this time, the only thing the Germans couldn’t deprive the Jews was their hope and humanity. Within the memoir, the theme presented is, “We must never forget, never forget...Human hope & faith must never die…”.

In the past many horrific events have happened that many people choose not to believe. One of those events was the Holocaust. Millions of innocent people died during this tragedy, but what about the people who survived? How did this affect them? A survivor, Elie Wiesel, wrote about his experience during the Holocaust, and how it changed him as a person. In his book “Night”, the main character Elie went to the concentration camp Auschwitz. Throughout the story, he gained new character traits that he carried for the rest of his life.

As with all human beings, there are happy memories and bad memories. Some have no effect, and others can change someone’s life completely. Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, writes about Elie’s external conflict of the horrors of the Holocaust’s violent concentration camps. Elie resolves this conflict by having all the hope of the world in him and enduring the evident deaths of his family members; however, Elie’s trek also illustrates his character as both enduring and dependent. Elie’s decision to staying hopeful and stay enduring also reveals the universal theme of, “The toughest and darkest of times and experience can test your hope”

In class we previously read the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. This book told the story of young Elis’s life as he suffered through the holocaust. As we all know the holocaust was a very dark period, where millions upon millions lost their lives. Prisoners from all over were taken and jailed in concentration camps where they were tortured endless with no boundaries. Along the way to liberation many lost hope and gave up completely. Certain traumatizing events affected the prisoner's hope along with the inner and outer forces.

Hillenbrand, L. (2010). Unbroken: A World War II story of survival, resilience, and redemption. New York: Random House.

After nearly two years of misery, a young boy finally saw the first ray of hope on the horizon; the Americans had finally arrived, and the Nazis were gone. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Wiesel was one of the minority of Jews to survive the Holocaust during World War II. His family did not make it through with him, and this had lasting effects. Wiesel’s identity changed completely during his experiences in Auschwitz; he lost his faith in God and he became indifferent to his survival and the survival of his family members. Despite these hardships, however, he ultimately became a stronger person than he was before.

“Never shall I forget that smoke… Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever...Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into ashes…”(page 34). Elie Wiesel, the author of “Night”, describes his experiences in the Holocaust. Elie experiences pain and suffering throughout his time in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, and he shares how he survived. In the book “Night” the main character, Elie, is affected by the events in this book such as loss of faith, emotional connections with his father, and his self changes mentally and physically.

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.

The aim of this book review is to analyze Night, the autobiographical account of Elie Wiesel’s horrifying experiences in the German concentration camps. Wiesel recounted a traumatic time in his life with the goal of never allowing people to forget the tragedy others had to suffer through. A key theme introduced in Night is that these devastating experiences shifted the victim 's view of life. By providing a summary, critique, and the credentials of the author Elie Wiesel, this overview of Night will reveal that the heartbreaking events of the Holocaust transformed the victims outlook, causing them to have a lack of empathy and faith.

Many outsiders strive but fail to truly comprehend the haunting incident of World War II’s Holocaust. None but survivors and witnesses succeed to sense and live the timeless pain of the event which repossesses the core of human psyche. Elie Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom are two of these survivors who, through their personal accounts, allow the reader to glimpse empathy within the soul and the heart. Elie Wiesel (1928- ), a journalist and Professor of Humanities at Boston University, is an author of 21 books. The first of his collection, entitled Night, is a terrifying account of Wiesel’s boyhood experience as a WWII Jewish prisoner of Hitler’s dominant and secretive Nazi party.

World War II, one of the largest conflicts in human history took the lives of approximately six million Jews. Those who were fortunate enough to survive walked away as changed human beings. They walked away questioning their very being and struggling with the memories of what they had experienced. Elie Wiesel, the narrator and author of the novel Night, was one of few Jews who survived the war; however, the atmosphere and the horrors of the concentration camps make Elie question his religious teachings, and slowly deteriorated his belief in god. In time this conflict slowly undermines everything Elie has learned from his community which in result causes him to ask questions and more importantly ask the right questions.

Up to 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust, either in concentration camps, Nazi marches, or in ghettos. Out of all the deaths the few that survived lived to tell their stories, and Elie Wiesel was of one them. He wrote a memoir titled Night, in which he shares his experience with readers all around the world. By using many different style devices Wiesel's memoir demonstrates a sober style that is serious, solemn, or grave; writing which is not exaggerated or distorted.

Elie Wiesel’s mesmerizing book, Night, is a retelling of his own teenage experience of the Jewish holocaust. As Wiesel recounts these chilling events, a thread of darkness runs throughout the story. A central question of doubt versus hope arises as the young boy questions his faith, the goodness of people, and the justice of God. Wiesel uses many literary devices to take the reader on an emotional journey. His use of personification and metaphor make this book nothing short of gripping causing the reader to experience brief hopes so quickly destroyed by the unthinkable.