More than three million Jews were killed in concentration camps during World War Two. The concentration camps were extremely brutal and people who experienced them were treated like animals. When Jewish people were thrown into concentration camps, not only had they been stripped of their basic rights, but they had been stripped of their lives as well. Everyday they would witness fellow jews dying or being killed. Anyone who ever lived in a concentration camp knew that they could have died any day. They knew that they no longer had control over their lives. Living in a place like that changed people drastically. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses characterization, imagery, and symbolism to show how awful his time in the concentration camps was and how it contributed to his loss of faith. Wiesel uses characterization of himself when he was a young boy and when he was a teenager in the concentration camps by explaining how much he loved his religion and how much more he wanted to learn about it and then by explaining how it regressed the longer he was in the concentration camps. When Elie Wiesel was 13 he believed in God more than anything else. He prayed every single day. One time Moishe the Beadle watched Elie pray …show more content…
To Elie, God was nothing. He did not exist because if he did exist, then where was he? How could he let so many of his beloved children suffer like they had? Why had he not done anything to fix what was happening or to stop it? Why did he let it happen in the first place? There were too many unanswered questions about God that Elie constantly thought about. Eventually Elie just got tired of asking them. He no longer wondered. Instead he just stopped believing.God was not real to Elie, because if he was, he would have done something to help. Loss of faith, imagery, symbolism, and characterization were used as themes and points of scope throughout the novel to show how much concentration camps really can change a
They used repetition, imagery, symbolism, along with pictures and metaphors just to speak the unspeakable. The author of Night, Elie Wiesel was a firsthand account of events that took place in the concentration camps. He uses repetition, a powerful literary
Elie Wiesel experienced a large amount of tragic events during the holocaust which make loose faith. Elie was talking to his dad about how if he would put his life along the line just for his religion. Then he puts into perspective about how he had to question God himself, asking these different questions. Then later on in the book there was a child hanging and, well, he just then was questioning God even more. God was maybe where
During the public hangings, Elie had traumatizingly listened to the outcries of reactions from the prisoners as they searched for the Lord in vain. At the beginning of the story, Moishe the Beadle explains to Elie how “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him…Man asks and God replies. But we don't understand His replies. We cannot understand them” (Wiesel, 5). One's link to Him is able to be strengthened through prayers and questions that are directed to God.
It was in Auschwitz during 1944, at the time of arrival about midnight when the smell of burning flesh saturated the air. There was an unimaginable nightmare of a truck unloading small children and babies thrown into the flames. This is only one event in its entirety of endless events to be remembered in order to understand how deeply literal and symbolic the book entitled Night by Elie Wiesel is. The novel brings light to the reader about what the Jews faced while in fire, hell and night; nonetheless, the author portrays each and every day during this year as a night in hell of conflagration. "Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes."
Elie struggled with his relationship with God frequently throughout the book. In the beginning he practiced Kabbalah but in chapter 5 he doesn’t even want to acknowledge God’s presence. He had a complex relationship with God and he wavered in his beliefs. His relationship with God is important because we see how hardships can change someone's beliefs and how easy it was for him to put the blame on God. During chapter 5 it was the end of the Jewish year and the prisoners got together and prayed.
Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy” (Joe Paterno). Tragedy is defined as an "event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident" when Elie went thought the holocaust his way of life and meaning of life dramatically changed for the worst. Elise process of change without World War 2 has shaped his faith, personality and his relationship with his father. Initially, Eliezer’s faith is a product of his studies in Jewish mysticism, which teach him that God is everywhere in the world, that nothing exists without God, that in fact everything in the physical world is an “emanation,” or reflection, of the divine world.
Where’s God? How can I belive, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?”(83). Elie states basically god doesn’t exist, if he did they would of been saved but they are left to suffer. At this point it would take something pretty miraculous to spark back Elie's faith. Finally, Elie finds himself saying, “And in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed.
In chapters 4 to 6 in the novel, “Night”, Elie Wiesel and his father continue to suffer in the grasp of the Germans. Eventually, all the Jews are moved to a new work camp, Buna, where they are overworked and undernourished, and resort to killing each other for pieces of bread. In his old home, Elie had never experienced brutality and inhumanity within it. Now, Elie and other Jews witness extreme violence and an absence of mercy that begins to erode their mental state; bringing most men to animalistic tendencies. In chapter 4, the Jews arrive in Buna.
As stated by Wiesel, at a desperate point Jewish prisoners needed help from God. Elle believed God chose to be silent in a time when people needed him. This drove Elie to thoughts of committing suicide because if God wasn’t helping the prisoners there is no point of living. Elle thought there was no point in thanking God because he believed didn’t do anything to help the prisoners that were praying to him and asking for help. He questioned the reason why people even try to have hope that The Almighty would help them if he wouldn’t even answer their Kaddish to him.(33) Wiesel believed, Elie came close to giving up on hope when a son killed his own father for food on a train to another camp.
Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves” (Wiesel 67). He goes against his faith in times of disparity, as he watches disaster strike all around him. As Elie went through these events, his faith was degraded and
He seems to find any possible way to fight against. “But further, there was no longer any reason why I should fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him,” (Wiesel, 76). As the book progressed, Elie found every possible way to fight against God or his retired religion.
And why wasn’t god answering. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah they were at the Solemn service and Elie was not thrilled to be at the ceremony, the Kapos putting on the
The Holocaust affects Jews in a way that seems unimaginable, and most of these effects seem to have been universal experiences; however, in the matter of faith, Jews in the concentration camp described in Elie Wiesel’s Night are affected differently and at different rates. The main character, Elie, loses his faith quickly after the sights he witnesses (as well as many others); other Jews hold on much longer and still pray in the face of total destruction. In the beginning, all of the Jews are more or less equally faithful in their God and religion.
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.
When Moishe the Beadle, Eliezer’s Jewish mysticism teacher asks Eliezer why he prays Eliezer states that he does not know why. “‘Why do you pray?’ he asked after a moment. Why did I pray? Strange question.