Night by Elie Wiesel brings back the traumatic events of Holocaust. The true story Night begins with a twelve year old boy named Elie who lives in the small village of Sighet, Romania with his father and mother. His instructor returns from a near death experience and warns them of Nazi aggressors that will soon threaten the peacefulness of their lives. Elie and his father remain calm until they are shipped (with many other Jews) in the spring on a convoy headed for Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, a concentration camp. Elie uses metaphors of “night” to convey darkness, death, and loss of faith used as a symbol for enduring the horrible conditions and traumatic events. First the word “night” is often used to describe darkness, and it …show more content…
Often when people think of death they envision darkness which is portrayed in the night. Wiesel uses night as metaphor for death in that he uses the darknesses that surround the night sky. All around he would only see his fellow Jews being murdered and forced to live in horrible conditions which are dark. Elie had to witness a fellow Polish named Juliek play with his heart even with no hope left,” I don't know how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke at daybreak, I saw Juliek facing me, hunched over, dead. Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant lit-tle corpse.”(Wiesel, 95) Juliek played the song of death with little hope left for him and his violin. Although Elie witnessed many deaths already, the death of a child was his breaking point, “"Caps off!" screamed the Lagerälteste. His voice quivered. As for the rest of us, we were weeping. "Cover your heads!" Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering betweenlife and death, writhing before our eyes.”(Wiesel, 64) The child could do nothing but slowly feel the rope cutting his circulation. With the little amount of food Elie already gets he would try to ration the food but after witnessing the death of that child, “That night the …show more content…
Before Elie was shipped to the concentration camp he would spend his time studying Jewish mysticism, “One evening, I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar, the Kabbalistic works, the secrets of Jewish mysticism.”(Wiesel, 5) he once had a love for his race before war changed his mind. Elie believed that if God answered him everything would be ok but when he did not, “Never shall i forget those flames that consumed my faith forever…..Never shall i forget those moments that murdered God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes….Never.” He even prayed to God even when he did not believe he was there. God had not helped Elie even after he would sing his praises, “We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.” Elie was tired of God’s silence, he did not show him mercy with all that he endured. The destruction, the death, the conditions ruined his faith and any hope he had
In this essay I am going to show evidence that he lost his faith, not only in his God, but in his leaders and his father. Elie lost faith in his leaders. The cruel actions the Nazis performed in the concentration camps says plenty about why. But when Elie's leg was still recovering in the infirmary, his neighbor said this, “ I have more faith in Hitler than anyone else. He alone has
It’s often complicated to metaphorically express a depressing topic with only one word that people can relate to. Author Elie Wiesel had managed to complete this feat, though many may argue what exactly Wiesel meant to express. The word “night” symbolizes fear, hopelessness, and futility. This gives reason to why the word and its extended metaphor are appropriate for the title. To put a start to the claim, the word night symbolizes fear because, at many points of the biography it tells of the situations where Wiesel and his family experienced the horrible emotion.
During Elie’s time in the concentration camp, he battled with believing and not believing in faith. For example, when Elie starts to see the negative experience that goes on in the camp, he starts to lose faith in God, therefore he begins to question God actions. For instance, he wants to know why God was letting bad things happen to some of the prisoners, or were they supposed to learn from this experience. Another thing is that, when they arrived at the camp Elie “say’s never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp that turned my life into one long night” (Night pg. 34).
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah Elie began to question God. He did not understand how Jews around him could still have faith and have the capacity to bless him. Elie could not understand how the Master of the Universe would cause thousand of children die. He believed that the gas chambers belonged to God and that God had created the concentration camps. He was sure God was the one to blame for letting something so catastrophic like this occur.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a powerful memoir taht tells the story of the author'srs experiences during the holocaust. The book is a testament to the horrors of humanity and the unspeakable suffering that can occur when people turn against one another. However, despite the overwhelming darkness that Wiesel faced, he was able to overcome the pain and tragedy of his past and find hope for the future. The experiences that Wiesal endured in the concentration camps, such as the loss of his family and friends, the physical and psychological abuse, and the constant fear of death,would have been enough to break the spirit of any person.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a powerful memoir that recounts the author's experiences as a young boy during the Holocaust. The book is a poignant reminder of the horrors of war and the devastating consequences of hatred and prejudice. Two significant events from the memoir that impacted Elie on an emotional and personal level are the deportation of his family to Auschwitz and the death of his father. The deportation of Elie's family to Auschwitz was a traumatic event that had a profound impact on him.
At the beginning of the book, Elie is very spiritual. Before being forced into the concentration camps, Elie is very spiritual and has lots of faith in God. He states, "I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple" (3). This quote is a great example of how the Holocaust can change people, as it provides a starting point for measuring the changes Elie goes through.
At this point in his life, Elie had all of his needs and was sincerely loyal to his religion. While Elie was in Auschwitz, some of the other Jews began praying and saying that God is testing them, to see how much they are able to handle. Elie did not agree with praying to the person who was supposedly responsible for all of this. “As for me, I had ceased to pray... I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”
Even though Elie is a young boy, he feels that his religion is the most crucial thing in his life. His faith was strong here, he had no doubts about it, he believed that praying was one of the most essential things in his life, like breathing. “Oh God, Master of the universe, in your infinite compassion have mercy on us. ”(Wiesel 20). When Elie and his family are first taken by the police and forced to run, he prays to God that he will have mercy on the Jewish people.
However, the metaphorical meaning of Night refers to the evil, hopeless, and emotional coldness that the Jews are constantly forced to face throughout the Holocaust. He used to love God and religion but now he is questioning it all. Starting to think man is stronger than God. In the camps, Elie must struggle to stay alive and to remain human. As more people started dying and more horrifying things happened so did his faith to believe in God.
Night In the darkness of night, it’s hard to know what happens in the shadows without light leading the way. In the novel Night, the author ,Elie Wiesel, uses literary devices to show the “light” that leads a young boy through the holocaust. Using devices such as setting, irony, symbols, and point of view help us understand the background, what he thinks is happening vs. what know is happening, and how he sees things that help us realize the twist on words that the narrator uses to direct problems into someone else’s path.
In Night by Elie Wiesel, he writes how dark the world can be. Night is about a 15 year old boy and his terrifying experience in the holocaust .Night symbolizes the darkness that the Jewish people constantly felt, a time when they were suffering, and had little to no hope. Wiesel demonstrates this with the woman screaming on the way to the camp, when Elie’s innocence and childhood was taking away on the first day of camp, and Elie’s experience on the train going to Buchenwald. On the first day going to camp,there was a woman who was screaming about a fire,but none of the prisoners saw it. “As soon as night fell, she began to scream ‘There’s a fire over there!’She would point in space, always the same(p.24).In this part of the book, Night
As for me, I had ceased to pray... I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). It is apparent here that the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish people’s faith was delayed on some level. Elie refuses to pray to the God that apparently abandoned him. This is personified when he says he doubts that God has absolute justice.
When they withdrew, there were two dead bodies- the father and the son” (Wiesel 102). I can be argued that this is the most powerful yet disheartening scene in the entire narrative, as the imagery in this passage truly leaves the reader stunned in disbelief and
But after the invasion by the Nazis, all the Jews started to suffer, starve, die, and specifically Elie started losing faith in God. “Where is merciful God, where is He?’’ , questions like this were posed before him. This quote shows that not only Elie but other Jews were questioning God and it seemed that they were losing faith in God as