How Did Elie Wiesel Change In Night

Imagine everything that keeps you human being quickly stripped away from you, turning your importance into a number on a chart. This is what Elie Wiesel experiences in the Holocaust and is what he wants to express to the reader in Night. His character changes drastically throughout the memoir, changing him from a happy, carefree religious boy to a desensitized husk of his former self, broken by his experiences in Auschwitz. When the memoir begins, Elie’s biggest concern was his belief that he should study Kabbalah, while his father believes he is too young. Then he shifts the tone of the memoir with the line “

Elie experienced a lot of fear during the Holocaust. He was always scared because there wasn’t really a time when you shouldn’t. They always lived in death the entire time they were in Auschwitz.

Within seconds of being there, he lost his faith in god. Elie Wiesel’s joy and love for his religion completely changed from wanting to learn, to doubting it. Wiesel’s change in faith helped keep him alive in the concentration camp. When he was in the camp the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur came around and in his words, “To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death” (Wiesel 69). A lot of the people did not fast including Elie because his father told him not to and because he, “[...] no longer accepted God’s silence” (Wiesel 69).

In the book ‘Night’, about Elie Wiesel's experience with the holocaust, his connection with God changes through the hardships he faces, and he loses his connection and identity associated with God. The change in Elie's relationship with God is shown by his first devotion, his gained defiance, to his finally concluding that God is dead. When the story started he was a young boy, wanting to know more about God, and increase his devotion. “One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah.”

During all of the struggles Elie gains a bit of life knowledge, and learns more emotions about himself. If this journey never happened Elie would still be focussing about his studies and not about his family. A fact Elie acquires during the holocaust is always to stay positive in hard times. An example of this is when Elie is running for miles and notices men giving up just makes Elie think about when he can sleep and eat at the next camp. When news comes that the Russians will save the prisoners, Elie keeps this as a positive and keeps thinking this horrifying journey will be over.

The amount of death that Elie witnessed made him numb to the loss of someone. He remained stong, hopeless but strong. Throughout the book Elie speaks about God putting the Jewish people in this situation and how he feels he can’t pray to a God that would do such a thing. Elie no longer pleaded with God to save the victims of the Holocaust. Elie clung to the thought that he would do this with his father in the small idea that they could some how make it out alive, and that is why he remained strong.

Rudolf and his friends loved listening to classical music and Frank Sinatra. They also loved going on bike rides, one of which lasted several days. Although Elie Wiesel does not write much about his childhood before the events of the holocaust it is known that he had 3 siblings, 2 older sisters, and one younger. It is also known that he studied Kabbalah which is a part of Judaism; he had to study it without his father because his father believed him to be too young to learn

Wiesel reflects on the horrendous anguish and devastation he suffered in the concentration camps, and how it affected his belief and point of view on life. This is known as the "nocturnal calmness," and throughout this period of quietness he experienced atrocious brutality and cruelty. This experience, which caused him to feel as though his God and spirit had been murdered, drained all of his desire to carry on. This displays how the violence and cruelty he encountered in the camps resulted in him losing his faith and hope in humanity. The passage also indicates how Wiesel's time in the camps had a huge effect on his perspective of the world.

During their journey, many of the Jews were shot because they could not keep up, and while the sound of the Nazi guns rang through the air, they were reminded of how little their lives meant to their captors. Once they made it to the next camp, they were treated as if they were dead. They were thrown onto the ground, lying on top of people while more people were thrown on top of them. While they had no way of knowing if these people were alive or not, they were, at this point, accustomed to death. When Elie was crushed under the weight of others, he was unable to think of anyone but himself, not able to make himself care about the lives of others.

”I did not weep and it pained me the i could not weep. But i was out of tears. And deep inside me, if i could i have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, i might have found something like: Free at last!... ” When his father died Elie wasn't sad all he could think of was the weight that was lifted off his chest, that he no longer had to be constantly worried or tending on his

Wiesel's loss of faith was brought on by the absence of God. This resulted in him questioning why it was God's will to allow Jews to suffer and die the way they had. Another portrayal of religious confliction within Wiesel was the statement of his faith being consumed by the flames along with the corpses of children (Wiesel 34). Therefore, he no longer believed God was the almighty savior everyone had set Him out to be or even present before them. To conclude, his experiences within Nazi confinement changed what he believed in and caused him to change how he thought and began questioning God because of the actions He allowed to take

It goes without saying Elie was very strong. The mental and physical resilience it would have taken to come back from that experience, to go on and publish books and do interviews is unimaginable. If Elie wasn’t empathetic, he wouldn't have kept his father alive as long as he did, and he himself may not have been around to share his experience. If Elie wasn't resilient, he wouldn't have been able to constantly recount his experiences to the world. He could have simply holed himself up and hid from the world, a thought that would have no doubt been tempting.

Wiesel changes vastly throughout the book, whether it is his faith in God, his faith in living, or even the way his mind works. In the beginning of his memoir, Wiesel appeared to be faithful to God and the Jewish religion, but during his time in concentration camps, his faith in God wavered tremendously. Before his life was corrupted, he would praise God even when he was being transferred to Auschwitz, but after living in concentration camps, he began to feel rebellious against his own religion. In the book, Elie

He lost his innocence and began to feel hatred toward god for letting innocent people die. Elie changed and he became rebellious. He began to wish for things he regretted later and he lost all hope. He became an entirely different person. Elie went through life changing events and he was traumatized.

(Wiesel 82). Elie is heartbroken when this event occur because throughout the whole story Elie’s role model was his father and to see him get beaten made him lose hope. During their times in the camp the suffering laid upon on both Elie and his father made them give up on themselves and feel like they didn’t have a chance to make it out or survive. This was shown once again in depth when Elie said to himself, “Were there still miracles on this earth?” (Wiesel 76).