Evil In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Evils and Format of Night The novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, tells about his experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. It is an extraordinary work telling the terrifying and real life experiences from the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was one of the few survivors of the holocaust, and tells his miraculous story of what he went through and how he survived a long, life threatening year in the camps. The Holocaust was a time period in the early 1900s where 6-million Jews were killed off by Nazi Germans lead by Adolf Hitler. If not killed, they were taken to Concentration Camps where they were worked, starved, and beaten to death. These camps were where Eli and his father were taken. In the Concentration Camps a multitude of evil was present in both German soldiers and the Jewish prisoners for many
obvious and surprising reasons. Additionally, the book is supported by several rhetorical and narrative techniques that lay out the structure and format, adding a compelling, logical foundation for the novel. The title of Night perfectly gives an idea or generalization of the book’s theme. Night is a the period of darkness in each twenty-four hours; the time from sunset to sunrise. Typically, the night is a time for evil and monsters to roam. The novel was most likely named Night because it describes the evils or dark side of the Holocaust and how the events changed a great amount of souls. Because of the impact on the people inside, outside, and the leaders of the event, the purity of those people were disturbed and their inner evil was brought out and humanity lost between starvation, death, power, and unimaginable experiences. In the novel, a multitude of examples portraying how evil can take over an innocent person, bring out the worst in someone, and erase what is left of their humanity are present. For example, Eliezer describes that because of his intense hunger all he thinks about is food and how he was no different than everyone else. He says, “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time” (Wiesel 52). This shows how Eliezer was worked and starved to death that the only thing that mattered to him was the small portions of bread and soup he would receive. His hunger began to become him and because of this, his uniqueness was taken from him and he ended up just like everyone else: hungry, miserable, and helpless. Wiesel used a hyperbole to portray an exaggeration; he did not actually only have the soup and bread in his life. This type of writing technique emphasizes how desperate he was for food. Another example of the loss of humanity, is in chapter seven.
In this chapter, the father had saved a piece of bread in his shirt and as he was about to eat the crust, his own son jumped on his father and killed him. The son went as far as to killing his father, a person who raised and cared for the son, all over a piece of bread. The father says,“Meir, my little Meir! Don’t you recognize me … You’re killing your father … I have bread … for you too … for you too … He collapsed. But his fist was still clutching a small crust. He wanted to raise it to his mouth. But the other threw himself on him. The old man mumbled something, groaned, and died. Nobody cared. His son searched him, took the crust of bread, and began to devour it.” (Weisel 102) This quote shows how being part of the Holocaust affected a boy and lead him to kill his own father. Furthermore, killing family is not something that would happen outside of the holocaust. This event stole humanity and brought out the evil in a young boy. Wiesel's use of imagery helps to describe in detail how the son kills his father and scrambles for the piece of
bread.
Lastly, an example of dehumanization is when the Jews were first “welcomed” into the concentration camps but soon after they arrived, they were immediately stripped of their clothes and heads were shaved, making everyone the same. “Within a few seconds we had ceased to be men, ”on page 34. This describes how after entering the camps they were stripped of their humanity and dignity. This made Wiesel and his father feel and look like everyone else. Wiesel uses Irony to describe how they thought they were being welcomed into a safe house, but they were actually going into a death trap where large number of people would be executed.
In conclusion, the Nazi concentration camps were torturous and disgusting camps where Jews and people who did not agree with the Nazi’s were killed off. Elie Eliezer describes in the novel, Night, how in these camps humanity was stripped from the prisoners and the evil was brought out in everyone. This outrageous and true book was an excellent read that told the real, hard truth of what happened with the Nazis and in the concentration camps.