Night Theme
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
― Elie Wiesel, Night
Summary
In 1944, Elie Wiesel spends much time on Jewish mysticism. His teacher, Moshe the Beadle, returns from almost dyeing warns that the Nazi will soon threaten that they we kill ever single Jew here. To move Jews, the Nazis force the Jews into supervised ghettos. Through all of the moving, Elie's family remains calm. The authorities begin shipping trainloads of
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Elie and his father lie about their ages, which allow them to work. Elie's mother and three sisters had been placed into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing babies being tossed into a burning pit, Elie stops believing in god.
Elie and the father, Chlomo, struggle to stay alive so they can stay working. After three weeks, Elie and his father are forced to march to Buna where they sort electrical parts as their new job. Then the guards hang a thirteen year old before Elie's
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At the beginning of the book, Elie believes in god and he wants to learn more. There is a part of the book “when he is asked why he prays to God, he answers, “Why did I pray? . . . Why did I live? Why did I breathe?”” But his thought in religion completely changes during the camps.
In the beginning of the book, he has a strong feeling about religion and he wants to learn more about it. He sates, “God is everywhere in the world, that nothing exists without God, that in fact everything in the physical world is an emanation of the divine world.” What this basically means is that Elie thinks that god is everywhere in the world. His studies tell him that god is good, and that god is everywhere in the world.
Elie basically thinks that the camps are just a nightmare. He wonders how God, someone that he trusts and believes in could be part of such a killing in the concentration camps. His religion is also made fake when he sees a ton of in humanity happening in the prisoners. Elie says, “If all the prisoners were to unite to oppose the cruel oppression of the Nazis. Then maybe he could understand the Nazi menace as an evil aberration. He would then be able to maintain the belief that humankind is essentially good. But he sees that the Holocaust exposes the selfishness, evil, and cruelty of which everybody—not only the Nazis, but also his fellow prisoners, his fellow Jews, even himself—are
This is where– hanging from the gallows…” (65). This was a big turning point for Elie’s view towards god. He started to doubt God and what he stood for. Maybe he still thought God was there, but in Auschwitz, God was nowhere to be
Elie didn’t see a life without God, to him it was unimaginable. About a year later, the Germans had invaded Transylvania and were currently moving Elie and his fellow Jews into concentration camps. While leaving the haven of his home town, Elie prayed to God, on page 20, he says, “Oh God, Master of the Universe, in your infinite compassion have mercy on us…”. After they arrived at the camp, Ellie was ripped away from the innocence that he and God walked together in. When the Jews arrived at the concentration camp, humanity seemed to slip right out of grasp, opposed to when they first arrived at the camp.
Night/Theme Elie Wiesels memoir is called Night because night is associated with fear, loneliness, and darkness. Elie felt all of these thing through the holocaust. Elie compared himself to the religious story of Job, Elie feels like God let atrocities and persecution happen to good men who did nothing wrong. They did not deserve any part of what was happening to them. In this quote Elie is saying I did not deserve this horrible matter to happen to me, I practiced my religion and had lots of faith and you still let this horrible stuff happen to me.
There are many themes shown throughout the book Night. However, I chose to focus on the theme," The silence of God and the world empowers evil. " This theme is represented multiple times in the story. For example on page 65 it says, "For God's sake, where is God?" (Wiesel 65).
Elie has many internal conflicts, the largest is with God. At the beginning of Night, Elie is seriously studying the Talmud, putting specific focus on the mysticism of the Jewish faith. Elie's father is not only a devout Jew, he is a person to whom people come for advice. Elie's faith is not only a comfort to him, it connects him with not only his father, but the people of his community. He takes tremendous pride in his studies because that is how he was raised and it is all he knows, which is why the horror of seeing his fellow Jews being systematically exterminated by the Nazis makes him question the very existence of God.
My theme for night was the preservation of self over others. Throughout the book many people become selfish and start to care only of themselves including Elie. The reason why I chose this as my theme is because I find it very interesting how under certain situations people change very rapidly. Elie soon comes to realize this , but does little to change it. Mostly ,because he needs to be this way in order to survive.
When he first arrives at the concentration camps, Elie is torn with confusion and anger towards God, this is where he first begins to doubt his faith and God’s justice towards humanity. When he is walking towards the crematorium, a man starts reciting the Kaddish, “As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (Wiesel 45). During the Holy Day of Rosh Hashanah, when his inmates are chanting prayers, he becomes angry and wonders what the point of praying to a God who does not protect them is.
The theme he develops is that even the most faithful people question God. This is seen on pages 67-68 when Elie questions God for letting bad things happen to people who believe in him. This theme is further explored on page 66 where Elie asks God where he is and why he would do this. These examples show how badly the Nazis treated them for them to disbelieve in their
His faith is also shaken by the attitudes and selfishness he sees among the prisoners. If the prisoners acted differently, he would then probably be able to believe that humankind is basically good. To Elie, The Holocaust exposes the worst qualities in everyone. Everybody in the story, besides Elie and his father, show selfishness, wickedness and brutishness, not only the Nazis, but also the
(Elie Wiesel). “Night” is a book written by Elie Wiesel about his experiences with his father in the Nazi German Concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald, throughout the Holocaust. The book was originally published in 1956. Throughout “Night”, one of the major themes was the idea of small acts of kindness. These moments in the story are important because they show what a huge
Eliezer has to learn how to adapt to not having as food as he used to, being beaten for no reason, and watching daily hangings. Eliezer specifically remembers one particular hanging of a young boy, a pipel, whose master has been gathered arms for the resistance. Eliezer said “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… ” Eliezer remembers how the child cried and remained alive for the next half an hour, before his body finally gives out and the child dies. Towards the end of the book, as the group that Eliezer and his father are in keeps running around Germany, and Eliezer has a choice to give up and die on the side of a road, but he continues to run because of his father. Eliezer says “My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me.
Belief and Faith is a “double-edged sword” to the jews, it cuts both ways. It keeps them alive, and at the same time makes them oblivious, and leads to their suffering. Over time, Elie’s belief in god, diminishes and eventually he questions God’s existence extensively and at point, Elie is infuriated that even though they are being tormented and enslaved, the Jews will still pray to god, and thank him, “If god did exist, why would he let u go through all the pain and suffering (33). This is a major point in the ongoing theme of faith and belief, because for once he is infuriated with the thought of religion in a time of suffering. Throughout the book, with the nazis ultimate goal is to break the jews and make dehumanize them and if anything, their goal is take and diminish their belief.
The cruelty of the German officers at the concentration camps change Elie’s personality throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Elie is deeply religious and spends most of his time studying Judaism. However, by the end of the novel, Elie believes that God has been unjust to him and all the other Jews, and has lost most of his faith. The cruelty of the German officers also changed the other Jews as well. The events of the Holocaust forces the prisoners to fend for themselves, and not help others.
Night Theme Paragraph Imagine having a loving family, and you're the happiest you could ever be, but then you get everything taken away from you. What would you keep? In the book Night written by Nobel peace prize winner, Elie Wiesel, He answers that same question throughout the the story. He shows through his marvelous writing that family is the one thing he would keep, and that family is the one thing everyone should keep with them because in a crisis, family is the only reliable constant.
Never shall [he] forget those things, even were [he] condemned to live as long as God Himself” (Wiesel 75). This quote leads me to believe that the suffering endured in the camps lead Elie to become lost with who he was. Elie and the other members of the Jewish community try to keep their faith as much as they can even though it is being tested. As shown in Night enduring suffering forces people to become much different versions of themselves.