From the scorching heat of the desert to the bone-chilling cold of the winter, weather can be a formidable antagonist that tests the resilience of the human spirit. Elie Wiesel's "Night" conveys the profound emotional and physical pain endured by the prisoners of the Holocaust. The unbearable temperatures that suffocated the concentration camps serve as a reflection of the inhumane conditions they faced. The heat gives a glimpse into the physical and emotional anguish endured by Wiesel and his fellow prisoners. Additionally, the heat serves as a haunting reminder of the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. Overall, the contrasting weather patterns in the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, prove that when faced with adversity, even in the most …show more content…
The first example of this is before Elie and his father even arrive at Auschwitz. They are forced to stand in cattle cars for days with a lack of both food and water. The conditions were so intense that people began to die and hallucinate. “We began to be tortured by thirst. Then the heat became unbearable” The scene highlights the inhumane conditions the prisoners were subjected to and eluded to the horror they will face when they arrive at the camps. In this example Wiesel uses the heat to foreshadow that their situation was only going to get worse. Another example of a similar situation that the prisoners were in is when they were living in the concentration camp barracks. The barracks were overstuffed with prisoners making it extremely hot and uncomfortable for everyone. In chapter 3, Wiesel describes that the conditions in the barracks became so unbearable that some prisoners experienced hallucinations and became delusional. Wiesel writes “The heat was unbearable. We were all thirsty, It was as if a strange story of paralysis had taken hold of us.” The quote both illustrates that physical and psychological hold the heat had put on the prisoners. Overall in the story heat is used as a metaphor for oppression and dehumanization in the concentration camps, and as an example of the inhumane conditions that the prisoners were subject
These camps show many circumstances of inhumanity. The prisoners were so malnourished that Wiesel even writes, “I was nothing but a body, perhaps even less: a
The book, “Night”, by Elie Wiesel is a first-hand account that traces his life before and during the holocaust and in the concentrations camps. There were many experiences that Wiesel faced that impacted him as a person. Wiesel coped with these experiences and his new life in Auschwitz by pretending as if he wasn’t there and by not caring about anyone else. Out of the many experiences Wiesel faced in the book, there were three main ones that stood out to me.
Night, by Elie Wiesel, is about his experience in the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel gave a speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, at the white house in front of the president about “indifference” and its effect. Throughout his memoir and speech, Wiesel uses rhetorical devices to encourage his readers to speak out for victims and not be silent when others are in danger. In the book, Night, Elie is taken to a camp with his family, he then is separated from his mother and sisters.
In Elie Wiesel's “Night” he is a young 15 year old boy going into the concentration camps not knowing what is to come from these experiences. In the book Elie Wiesel pushes through adversity during the Holocaust to find himself again in this traumatic situation. Wiesel’s cultural, physical, and geographical surroundings by the Nazi concentration camps hindered and skewed his psychological and moral trait development to becoming a human being. Elie Wiesel’s cultural situation was a mere faded blanket coming out of the camps from the Nazi demoralization techniques. Wiesel’s culture was stripped away from him at such a young age he couldn’t quite comprehend what the Nazi’s were trying to do.
Elie recalls a time in the camps when during a bomb raid a prisoner attempted to get an extra amount of soup from a cauldron that was left in the street (59) he was shot in the street for his actions. They were also not given proper protection from the elements. Many times during the winter prisoners would die from lack of blankets or heat in their
The circumstances of two different types of people in the same situation. “Night tells the story of Eliezer Wiesel, a studious Orthodox Jewish teenager living in Hungary in the early 1940s who is sent to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. In Auschwitz, Eliezer struggles to maintain his faith, bearing witness as the other prisoners lose faith and humanity” (“Night by Elie Wiesel | Summary, Quotes & Memoir - Video & Lesson Transcript”) The prisoners experience starvation, succumb to disease, and abuse from the guards. The Nazi doctors regularly perform selections where they decide who is no longer fit to work and, therefore, will be executed.
In Night, when Elie and the other prisoners were being transported to Auschwitz, young men beat and gagged a woman for screaming about fire and flames. Elie writes, “She is hallucinating because she is thirsty, poor woman…” (Wiesel 25). The cart ride was long and the prisoners were dehydrated and starving. The people in the cart thought the lady was crazy, screaming of death and fire.
It is used to reflect the cruel occurrences that happened in the concentration camps. The tragic mood of this savage event in the narrator's experience conveys how desperate and selfish people had become for food, even if it means putting aside family and unleashing brutality toward those loved ones for their own survival - as violence and cruelty had become a norm, showing how people have lost their humanity. All in all, Wiesel uses mood to convey the theme of losing humanity, reminding us of the cruel, inhumane nature of prisoners who have been affected by the Holocaust, as families got torn apart by selfishness. Nearly
Night, an autobiography that was written by Elie Wiesel, is from his perspective as a prisoner. The book focuses on Wiesel and his father experiencing the torture that the Nazis put them through, and the unspeakable events that Wiesel witnessed. The author, Wiesel, was one of the handfuls of survivors to be able to tell his time about the appalling incidents that occurred during the Holocaust. That being the case, in the memoir Night, Wiesel uses somber descriptive diction, along with vivid syntax to portray the dehumanizing actions of the Nazis and to invoke empathy to the reader.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the personal tale of his account of the inhumanity and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a young Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. Wiesel and his family are deported to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must learn to survive with his father’s help until he finds liberation from the horror of the camp. This memoir, however, hides a greater lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.
At times, it appears unviable for one’s life to transform overnight in just a few hours. However, this is something various individuals experienced in soul and flesh as they were impinged by those atrocious memoirs of the Holocaust. In addition, the symbolism portrayed throughout the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, presents an effective fathoming of the feelings and thoughts of what it’s like to undergo such an unethical circumstance. For instance, nighttime plays a symbolic figure throughout the progression of the story as its used to symbolize death, darkness of the soul,
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.”
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.
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.
Night is a powerful, first person account of the tragic horrors of the Holocaust written and endured by Elie Wiesel. In this dark literary piece, Wiesel's first hand tale of the atrocities and horrors endured in World War II concentration camps will leave an unforgettable, dark, macabre impression amongst readers that cannot be done with a simple listing of statistics. This tale of human perserverance and the dark side of human nature will cause readers to question their own humanity. Also, it will paint a vivid picture of the vile deeds that mankind is capable of expressing. Reading this book will leave a long lasting impression that is definitely not something that will be soon forgotten.