Elie Wiesel’s Night, unfolds the lurid tale of a 15-year-old Jewish boy’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. Wiesel’s title, merely a single word, embodies the hidden horrors found in the novel. In the concentration camp night signified the time when Wiesel was forced to separate from his father, the only family member he had left. It was during night when Wiesel reached his nadirs of suffering, the loss of his father accompanied by his soul. Night proved to be an inevitable darkness, captivating each person, only satisfied when leaving each to stand alone.…
Few historical events were as gut-wrenchingly horrifying as the Holocaust. It inspired countless stories in the decades that followed it. One example, Frank Borowski's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is a saddening story about a man working at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. It details his experiences collecting the belongings of prisoners who arrived at the camp, and his interactions with another worker. A large portion of the text had the narrator describing various specific prisoners, and thinking about how they affect him. This section presented an ironic incompatibility between two outlooks that is worthy of analysis, and provided indication as to Borowski’s intent for writing the story.…
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost…
In Auschwitz, it is killed or be killed and for most, killing comes without a second thought. Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel. Night is a story of Elie, one of the jews in the camp of Auschwitz and how he and his father survived. Wiesel discusses all of the people he met, the dangerous places he survived though, and the horrible acts he saw while in Auschwitz. Each of the examples demonstrate how survival acts as the dominant instinct. Wiesel utilizes characterization, setting, and mood to show that when survival is at stake, all else is forgotten.…
Many people believe that prisoners in Auschwitz do exactly what they are told, and nothing else. On the contrary, these prisoners took advantage of every opportunity and were selfish when it came down to a matter of life or death. They also had to rely on themselves, and not depend on others in order to survive. In the novels Night and Maus II by Elie Wiesel and Art Spiegelman, the main characters Elie and Vladek are prisoners at Auschwitz. Both Vladek and Elie take advantage of the opportunities given. They are also selfish when it comes to survival, hence only relying on themselves. This is crucial to their survival of the death camp. In Art Spiegelman’s Maus II and Elie Wiesel’s Night, Elie and Vladek have to take advantage of every opportunity,…
Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust and went on to to write a book about it. He then won the Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel developed a scar on his life when he was in multiple concentration camps during the Holocaust. He did survive and went on to write a book about his traumatic experience. Continuing after the book, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Upon winning, he wrote an acceptance speech for the award. The speech wasn’t tedious, it had a strong purpose that he wanted the world to be effected by.…
One fact that is most disturbing about the Holocaust is that they were forced to hide. People shouldn’t be treated like this and people shouldn’t treat other people like this. For example, in the Diary of Anne Frank the Franks and Van Daans and Dussel had to go into hiding because they would be forced to go to concentration camps. Their families would have been distributed and they would’ve not seen each other for years.…
There are many examples of dehumanization in this memoir. For example, Wiesel describes people reverting to primal, animalistic ways. Another example is the Nazis forcing people to do unforgivable things to their own family. These are both important examples. However, I think the best example is when Wiesel talks about his tattoo. While this is an obvious example, it is arguably the most important. After being tattooed, these people will be regarded as nothing more than a number on a list. Any hope that these people felt is gone. Hitler did not want them to hold on to their humanity.…
In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel showed that the Jewish people of Wiesel's hometown, Sighet, held on to illusions that gave them a false sense of hope and safety before their arrival at Birkenau. An example of this is when foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet crying, but the people of Sighet rumored that the deportees “were in Galicia, working” (6) and “were content with their fate” (6). When Moishe the Beadle, one of the deportees, managed to escape and come back he informed the people of the horrific fate the foreign Jews had endured under captivity of the Gestapo, German secret state police, who “shot [the] prisoners” (6), but people wrongfully concluded that “he had gone mad” (7). The Jews of Sighet also thought that “Hitler [would] not be…
Eliezer Wiesel a brave man, a role model, a leader. These traits describe an honorable man,…
Pathos- this is effectively used frequently through out the text so that the speaker gets the audience to be emotional. An example of this is when he says “ to be abandoned by god is worse than to be punished by him” (444). By saying this, the speaker get the audience to empathize with the victim, put themselves in the victims shoes, which gets the emotions and feeling across to all the members of the audience and get then engaged. He uses human emotion as a way to speak out against the holocaust and then speaks of the horrors of it to trigger emotion from the audience “Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz, the most tragic of all prisoners were the “Muselmanner” as they called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, unaware of who or where they were—strangers to their surroundings...” (444). This creates a feeling of horror and helps the…
Elie has changed as a result of his imprisonment. He has changed emotionally, spiritually, and physically.…
I completely agree! I thought Elie Wiesel’s speech was very moving! How often do we turn our heads from the hurt and suffering? I know that I am sometime uncomfortable with watching people suffer but I often don’t do anything about it. I know that there are hungry people in different countries. However, I don’t send money to organizations that will feed the hungry. I want to be a very generous person, but we all have our limits. Especially, since I am in high school I have a hard time saving money and also giving money. Even though I can’t give a lot of money I can volunteer my time. I believe that a lot of what Elie Wiesel still rings…
Genocide, a word that has affected millions yet it’s a crime that has never been committed. Millions have been killed due to a belief that they are subordinate as a group, yet genocide has not ever been declared. With over 10 million dead, where are the survivors? What compelled them to persevere and strive towards survival? Well, Elie Wiesel lived to tell the story. Elie tells about his struggles in his novel called Night. He speaks upon what had happened to him and his family in the holocaust, and what ultimately led him to living through the holocaust. The reason he is alive today and was able to tell the story, is because of his persistence to live, his mental strength to keep going, and his overall grit to become one of the historic survivors that he is today.…
In the memoir, Night, we discover how Elie Wiesel, one of the minority of Jews to survive the holocaust during World War II, identity changes in response to his concentration camp experiences. The war had been raging for two years and was about to enter Sighet. The Germans believed in the Aryan race and attempted to commit genocide on the ‘lesser’ races, particularly Jews. The separation from Elie's loved ones and the horrible conditions of these camps affect Elie immensely. Elie is affected in the following ways: physically, emotionally and spiritually. Through the brutality witnessed, acts of selfishness, the death of his father and the loss of his faith Elie changed. The Holocaust had changed him into a completely different person. The greatest change to Elie Wiesel's identity was his loss of faith in god. Before he and his family were moved to the camps, Elie was a religious little boy who cried after praying at night. After a few days in Auschwitz, a concentration camp, Elie Wiesel heard about the crematory and the fact that the Nazi's were killing the sick, weak, and the young. In his first night in the camp, Elie experienced his first crisis of faith. “Never Shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever... Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.” Later, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Elie was not able to celebrate the New Year with the other Jews in the camp. When the Rabbi said “Blessed be the name of the eternal,” Elie thought “Why, but why should I bless him?” In these quotes, Elie's frustration and anger is directed towards god because he has no one else to blame. He is appalled by everything happening around him, and cannot believe the god he spent all his time praying to was letting this happen. Elie's faith in god waned while he was in the camps. Since Elie used to be a religious Jewish person, losing his faith changes his…