Hope In Elie Wiesel's Night

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
Another illusion of hope and safety that the Jews of Sighet held onto was the thought that “[they] would remain in the ghetto[‘s] until the end of the war” (12) a place they thought was “peaceful and reassuring” (12) and “afterward everything would be as before”(12). During the departure from the ghettos “[t]here was joy” (16) because the Jews hoped that “there could be no greater torment in god’s hell” (16). The Jews who were later sent to the small ghetto rekindled the illusion of hope and safety by thinking they would “[be] allowed to go on with their...lives until the end of the war” (20) One of the final illusions the Jews had is when they arrived at the gates of Auschwitz and falsely believe “the conditions were good” (27) where they were headed. Elie Wiesel displays in his memoir, Night, that the Jewish people used illusions to feel more secure about their fate and feel a false sense of hope and safety. They hid in the shadows of these illusions up until their arrival at Birkenau where they “[smelt]... Burning flesh”