In the book Night by Ellie Wiesel a young boy describes his experiences as a Jew in the concentration camps during World War II. During this time, Wiesel witnessed many horrific acts. Two of these were executions. Though the processes of the executions were similar, the condemned and the Jew’s reactions to the executions differed tremendously. The first execution he describes in his book is one of many that occurred during his time in the camp. It was a hanging of a man that stole during an alert of the camp. In this execution, prisoners helped in order to get extra food during dinner. They felt like the man brought it on himself stealing for his own personal gain. During the ceremony, Wiesel recalled that a man named Juliek was standing when he asked “Do you think the ceremony will be over soon?”(59). This is a great example of the prisoners that were watching this horrific event didn’t feel any remorse or compassion for the man being hung. After the hanging had been complete, the prisoners had to walk by the hanging body and stare into his already dimmed gazed eyes. Wiesel states later that night he thought the soup …show more content…
The little boy was to be hanged for helping the Oberkapo with stocking a secret area with guns that would be used for a rebellion. No prisoners took part in this execution; the Lagerkapo won’t take part in the killing of a little boy. When the nooses were placed around their necks, the prisoners watching were weeping. When the chairs were kicked out from underneath the prisoners, the two adults necks snapped quickly, but the child didn’t weigh enough to kill himself immediately. As he was hanging there dying, the prisoners were forced to look the boy in the eyes and watch the live in him disappear. After the executions were finally over, the dinner bell rang, as the men sat there and ate, Wiesel states “the soup taste of
1- Elie Wiesel is comparing the soup to the taste of corpses because before they went to get their soup to eat, they watched the hanging of three bodies, two men and a child. They had to watch the light child struggle for life in the noose, watching him for half an hour up close until he died, no one wanted to see a child get hanged at an age like that. I feel that the emotions Elie is trying to communicate with us is extreme sadness and sorrow not only because of the death of the two prisoners, but because of the death of the boy. This quote to me, means that because of what he saw up close and for a half an hour, the 13 year old boy trying to cling to his life in the noose, had left a bad taste in his mouth for the soup.
When Wiesel said, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. (115)” it revealed how little there was left of him after the camps.
This quote shows that the prisoner is rebelling against the Germans. This action gave many people in the camps hope because they are not in a place to rebell. This in a way, restored the prisoner faith and boosted their morale. This is the reason why his soup tasted better. However, during the second hanging, a small child was also sentenced to death.
His first night in the concentration camp destroyed him, crumbling down the wall of innocence until there was nothing left. Everything he had once known and loved, taken away in the blink of an eye. As Wiesel put it, “Never
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
In this memoir, Elie Wiesel uses imagery in order to develop the presence of animal-like behavior on people when they are being dehumanized. At this point of the story, Elie and the other prisoners are in a wagon traveling to a different concentration camp, and they are trying to survive in inhuman conditions. To begin, Wiesel describes, “We were given bread… We threw ourselves on it… Someone had the idea of quenching his thirst by eating snow.”
The people had already put aside their emotions for others, and began to give up all hope for a better life, and then the public executions made many give up their religious beliefs and hope for a nice afterlife. Whenever the gallows first showed up, and the first hanging of a boy took place, Elie thought, “this boy, leaning up against the gallows, deeply upset me”(Wiesel, 62). The sense of justice and that the good were rewarded and the bad were punished began to fade. The Jews can see that the judges in the camps can do as they please and choose who lives and dies, and that the sentences are not always fair. The crematorium did not involve them looking death in the face, but with the gallows they were dehumanized because they could not look away from the facts that life is not fair and just, and that their beliefs should be doubted.
Night by Elie Wiesel describes his experiences as a Jew in the concentration camps during World War II. During this time, Wiesel witnessed many horrific acts. Two of these were executions. Though the processes of the executions were similar, the condemned and the Jews’ reactions to the execution were different. One execution was the single hanging of a strong giant youth from Warsaw.
Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent
When the young boy asks, “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent”, (paragraph 5) again the audience is prompted to emotionally respond. They have to realize that it was all of them, all of us, who remained silent and that this silence must never happen again. Wiesel demonstrates a strong use of pathos throughout his speech to encourage his audience to commit to never sitting silently by while any human beings are being treated
To begin with, Wiesel could not believe what was happening. He didn’t believe how cruel the Germans were. Wiesel was living a nightmare and couldn’t escape it. For instance, Wiesel stated, “I pinched myself; was I still alive? Was I awake?
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
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
Wiesel begins to use darker comparisons as the novel progresses, which begin to document how circumstances were changing and negatively affecting victims. An instance of this is when he describes the hangings that he witnessed, upon which he reflects that the soup tasted like corpses that evening (Wiesel 72). Wiesel uses this comparison to depict one of the most gruesome scenes throughout the book, which symbolizes how these horrific events had such a great impact on him. He conveys how the hangings affected him by addressing how this event lingered on his mind for prolonged periods of time. In addition, another example where Wiesel 's figurative language marks a decline in optimism is when the victims must decide whether or not to fast during Yom Kippur, but Wiesel states that due to the food rations at the camps, "The whole year was Yom Kippur" (Wiesel 76).
Wiesel used foreshadowing in the story of Mrs. Schachter by having her yelling about a fire. Of course, no one knew of what she was talking about, so they quieted her. She continues to yell later as well and so the young men gagged her. When they arrived at Auschwitz Mrs. Schachter