Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Michelle Goss
P.4
Never Forget More than six million Jews were killed in World War II, with over two million of those killed, being children. The Jews were targeted in a mass genocide by the Nazis’, who ultimately were defeated, but not because of what they were doing to the Jews but because the allied forces were able to stop the Germans military advance. Elie Wiesel, author of Night, a biographical account of the Holocaust, does a skillful job in his narrative, showing us how hard it was for people to grasp the unbelievable possibility of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. We have to regularly remind ourselves of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust so that we are never lulled into believing that people couldn’t do something
so horrific to other humans again. Moshe the Beadle was introduced at the very start of the book as a true man of God; he truly cared about his fellow human beings.
One day the Hungarian police rounded up all the foreign Jews from the town Elie lived in, and took them away, Moshe was one of them. People were disturbed by this event, but after a few months passed the Jews had put it out of their mind and their lives returned to normal. One day Moshe returned, telling an unbelievable story of how the Gestapo (The German secret Police) unloaded all of the Jewish passengers they had taken and forced them to dig a pit, their own grave, where they would be buried after they had been executed. Moshe told the story of how “Babies were thrown into the air and machine gunners used them as target’s. “ (P.4) yet no one would believe him. Moshe had been wounded and mistaken for dead and had miraculously escaped. He spent the next several months, while returning to their town, stopping at one Jewish house after another, trying to warn them with his unbelievably disturbing story. “Jews, listen to me. It’s all I ask of you. I don’t want money or pity. Only listen to me,”(P.5) he begged. Nobody believed him, “they take me for a mad man.” (P.5). The Jews in the town Elie grew up in are representative of most of the Jews of that time who were unwilling and unable to believe the rumors that kept surfacing about horrible crimes being committed against Jews. They had no modern equivalent to compare their experience to. This is
why the story of the holocaust must be kept alive. Another reason the holocaust must be understood and studied is so that future generations will be aware of the causes that lead to genocide so that they can act themselves instead of waiting for others to save them.
The Jews who were targeted and persecuted during World War II had multiple warnings about the atrocities being committed against their people but they rationalized them away. Elie illustrates this point affectively in Night in a conversation with a fellow prisoner, “What have you come here for, you sons of bitches? What are you doing here, Ey?... You’d have done better to have hanged yourselves where you were then to come here. Didn’t you know what was in store for you at Auschwitz?” (P.28) This instigated murmurs from other prisoners, “We’ve got to do something. We can’t let ourselves be killed. We can’t go like beasts to the slaughter. We’ve got to revolt… Let the world learn of the existence of Auschwitz…,While they can still escape…” (P.29) But they had been warned but they refused to believe it, continuing to believe that the world and humanity wouldn’t allow such a thing to
happen. We can never forget what one group of humanity is capable of committing against another. “How could it be possible for {people} to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true.”(P.30) But it was true. Ultimately Elies retelling of what happened to him as a Jew during World War II helped to keep the story of the holocaust alive and circulating, so it never happens again. We must never forget.