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 opportunities given. They are also selfish when it comes to survival, and only rely 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, be selfish, and only depend on themselves in order for their survival of Auschwitz. Vladek has to take advantage of an offer he received from a Kapo in Auschwitz, in order to make the best out of what is happening. Vladek is in Auschwitz, and his block supervisor yells at him and others asking if anyone knew English. Vladek says he does, and the Kapo takes him aside …show more content…
In the death camp the characters are given opportunities to help better their situation. Both take full advantage of this, and become selfish with what comes of it. They also learn to rely on only themselves because you can trust no one to be there for you. They couldn’t think of anyone else’s problems but their own to survive. This still happens today, for example in the workforce. When an opportunity like a promotion is offered, most people will work harder and do whatever they can to take the promotion to better their lives. If Vladek and Elie hadn’t taken advantage of opportunities or hadn’t learned to rely on only themselves, would they have survived
Being the last sentence of the book, and out of all the passages I highlighted this one stood out to me and described Wiesel’s experience in just a few simple sentence. He looked at himself for the first time in many years, and did not recognize himself he saw a different person. This showed me that the concentration camps changed him he was a different person inside and out. The events that occurred to him had scared him so much that the man he saw in the mirror wasn’t him, but one who had been drained of life that looked lifeless from the events occurred in the concentration camps. He was weak and this whole passage embodies his weakness and the whole point of the concentration camps.
From just reading the first two sentences I can already tell how much these camps have changed the prisoners. The author, Primo Levi, reminds me much of Elie from the fact as they both refused to take showers as they thought it was a waste of precious energy, a resource they had little of and must conserve. We can already tell how much the Nazis wanted to turn these prisoners into beasts, as they had even taken away the delight of a shower, as well as marking them like cattle with numbers on their wrists. Primo Levi friend Stienlauf quotes “...the Lager (prison camp) was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell their story, to bear witness…” This is a very powerful quote, as it reminds me much of Elie holding on to his father as his will to live, to fight on pass the horrors of the camp and the Nazis.
In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when the ss officers were transporting all the prisoners from buna to another camp and whenever somebody couldn’t keep running the ss officers shoot them. “They had orders to shoot anyone who couldn’t sustain the peace”(Wiesel 85). The ss officers cruelty to the prisoners led them to give up, they stopped trying. If someone stopped and the officers didn’t noticed, he would probably die under the feet of all the people behind them. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed.
In Night. People in concentration camps tried to protect each other but struggled very hard to do so. Sometimes, they barely had a chance to begin with. For example, Elie witnessed someone kill himself because they already committed all he had left to taking care of a family member and was stuck. “A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father?
The severely cruel conditions of concentration camps had a profound impact on everyone who had the misfortune of experiencing them. For Elie Wiesel, the author of Night and a survivor of Auschwitz, one aspect of himself that was greatly impacted was his view of humanity. During his time before, during, and after the holocaust, Elie changed from being a boy with a relatively average outlook on mankind, to a shadow of a man with no faith in the goodness of society, before regaining confidence in humanity once again later in his life. For the first 13 years of his life, Elie seemed to have a normal outlook on humanity.
In the novel, “Night” Elie Wiesel communicates with the readers his thoughts and experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel describes his fight for survival and journey questioning god’s justice, wanting an answer to why he would allow all these deaths to occur. His first time subjected into the concentration camp he felt fear, and was warned about the chimneys where the bodies were burned and turned into ashes. Despite being warned by an inmate about Auschwitz he stayed optimistic telling himself a human can’t possibly be that cruel to another human.
In the span of a lifetime one often faces many adversities that stand within their path. While some challenges will be overcome easily, others will take a lot more tenacity. When in the face of adversity it is key not to give up. One should always strive to persevere through their hardships, no matter how severe they seem to be. The author of the memoir “Night” Elie Wiesel, vividly describes his experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Eliezer Wiesel narrates the legendary tale of what happened to him and his father during the Holocaust. In the introduction, Wiesel talks about how his village in Seghet was never worried about the war until it was too late. Wiesel’s village received advanced notice of the Germans, but the whole village ignored it. Throughout the entire account, Wiesel has many traits that are key to his survival in the concertation camps.
Even while watching his father get battered Elie thought to himself, “I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. This is what concentration camp life had made of me”(Wiesel 63). The Nazis physically beat the lives out of the Jews. Over time, Elie and the other prisoner’s presences became lesser and lesser because they did not have any strength left inside
Elie’s identity has been reshaped by the sensation of feeling meaningless because his name is accustomed around his personality which defines one’s identity. Thus without a name, Eliezer has no individual personality or identity. Auschwitz is eminent for their impeccable lifestyle and cold-blooded soldiers. The barbarous SS men are domineering towards the Jewish captives throughout their eerie threats and actions, as demonstrated in the following quotation, “From time to time, a shot exploded in the darkness. They had orders to shoot anyone who could not sustain the pace.
After going through so much, many people do not have the same mindset as they did before. Being tortured and watching others being tortured changes a person’s life, especially Elie’s, his father’s, Moshe the Beadle’s, and Rabbi Eliahou’s. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, shares his own experience of going through a concentration camp, and it is clear that many things in his life changed
It is the year 1941 and Elie is living a simple life. He goes to school, studies Torah and spends time with his family and friends. He seems happy; as happy as a young thirteen year old boy could be. As crazy as it may seem, his biggest struggles are learning Kabbalah and finding time to sleep. Although Elie doesn 't know it yet, this luxurious life that he is living came to an end the minute the Gestapo officers entered the Hungarian borders.
Elie Wiesel, author and victim of the Holocaust wrote the novel Night which portrays his experiences in the Holocaust. During the Holocaust the Nazis dehumanized many groups of people, but primarily the Jewish people. Elie writes about his personal journey through the Holocaust, and how he narrowly escaped death. In Elie’s novel he also provides detailed descriptions of what the victims of the Holocaust had to suffer through, and the different ways the Nazis made them feel like nothing more than animals that are meant to be used for work and slaughtered. One of the first things that Elie and the other Jewish people from his village have to suffer through is riding in a cramped cattle car, as if they were animals.
In a span of 10 years, the Holocaust killed over 7 million people, that’s just as much as the population of Hong Kong. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel shares his experience on how he survived the Holocaust and what he went through. How he dealt with the horrors and even to how he felt of his dad’s death and how he saw himself after it was all over. As he tried to publish it he was constantly turned down due to the fact of how horrid and truful it was. He still tried and tried until it was finally published.
In the novel Night the protagonist, Elie Wiesel, narrates his experiences as a young Jewish boy surviving the Holocaust. Elie 's autobiographical memoir informs the reader about how the Nazis captured the Jews and enslaved them in concentration camps, where they experienced the absolute worst forms of torture, abuse and inhumane treatment. Dehumanization is shown in the story when the Jews were stripped of their identities and belongings, making them feel worthless as people. From the start of Elie Wiesel 's journey of the death camps, his beliefs of his own religion is fragile as he starts to lose his faith. Lastly, camaraderie is present as people in the camps are all surviving together to stay alive so as a result the people in the camp shine light on other people 's darkness.