Traumatizing Experience In Elie Wiesel's Night

I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corps gazed back at me. The look in his eyes as they stared into mine, has never left mine.” (Wisel 83). What happened to Wiesel in the death camp was inhumane because they had turn his body into a walking corpse who now has no father.

After years of agony in concentration camps, a resistance movement finally decides to act. Thankfully, the movement overcomes the German soldiers and everyone has now escaped the chains of Auschwitz. The Jews are now free of all their torment. Three days after this revolution, Wiesel has become very ill and is transferred to a hospital. When Wiesel is recovering, he decides to get up and look in a mirror that is across the room from him.

In the end, Wiesel describes how the Nazis succeeded in turning the civilized people he once knew into vicious beings. Taking away their loved ones, their belongings, and even their names were all actions that ripped away from their person, from who these people were. His last days in Buchenwald Wiesel describes his life as no longer mattering. Everything was taken away from him and his father's death was one final blow. "Nothing mattered to me anymore...

After the death march to Buchenwald concentration camp, Wiesel’s father Shlomo’s health and strength begin rapidly deteriorating as he gets sick with dysentery. Wiesel is a very conscientious person, and he continues giving his father his ration and attending to him until the very end. Despite this, even cracks in Wiesel’s conscience begin forming as a result of the desperation and life or death reality that he faced. When the Blockälteste of the barrack tells Wiesel that he should stop sacrificing himself for his father, Wiesel thinks to himself “He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father … You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup …”

If the young boy had gave into all the torture and torment and told the SS officers the information they desired, he would’ve been killed on the spot– once the information was received, the SS officers no longer had a use for him. But his persistence postponed his sealed fate, even if it were only a couple of days. After his execution, the other inmate’s doubts and questions towards their God began to grow. His death also solidified Wiesel’s loss of faith and religion. In order to delay his eventual death, the young persisted with silence even when faced with inhumane

The repetition of the parallel events in the memoire also helps trace Wiesel’s changes throughout the course of his imprisonment at the concentration camps. For example, when Rabbi Eliahou is looking for his son after the 42-mile march, Wiesel realizes that during the run, the Rabbi’s son had intentionally run near the front of the pick after seeing his father stagger behind. Understanding that the son had been trying rid himself of his father whom he thought to be a “burden,” Wiesel prays to God to give him the resolve to never think about abandoning his own father (87). However, later on, when his father is struck with dysentery and is taken away on January 29 at the verge of death, Wiesel thinks to himself, “And, in the depths of my being,

Name: Sebastian Smith Teacher: Mr. Wolfe Class: ELA 8 Date: 3-9-23 Night analysis Imagine getting put into a concentration camp with your father and from then on, every thought you have is about your survival and keeping your very few loved ones close. Well this is what Elie Wiesel had to go through. This story is about a young boy named Elie Wiesel who gets put into a concentration camp with his father. He is immediately split from his mother and sister but his father does not leave his side.

“My father was a cultured man, rather unsentimental. He rarely displayed his feelings, not even with his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin.” (pg. 4) Although this quote shows a weak bond between Wiesel and his father, it also shows how due to the war, they were brought much closer by working to keep each other alive. After marching for miles in the dead of night, Wiesel collapsed in the snow, not wanting to go any farther.

As reality strikes for Wiesel’s father, he realises his bottled up emotions and true devotion towards his family. Weisel sees a whole new side of his father that he’s never seen before when he comes face to face with fear. Wiesel proves just how much his father changes when he emphasizes, “My father wept, it was the first time I had ever seen him weep”(16). This very moment is truly the starting point for Wiesel and his father’s first loving and symbiotic

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

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?

Wiesel addresses not only his own situation, but also the effect survival had inwards other fathers and sons in the camp. The memoir

Wiesel does not write on the battles fought during the war by armies but the small struggles comparatively- the ones that made an impact on them. Wiesel writes on the boy who killed his father for bread. He writes of those he saw hung like the child, the pipel,-“...the third rope was still moving: the child.. Still breathing... he remained...lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes... He was still alive... where is God?...

Many asserted to be nothing more than the walking dead, devoid of a heart and a soul; a shell, or distortion, of their former selves for their real selves perished in this event. Wiesel was no exception to the companionship of this shadow of death and its permanent effects. Though his body continued to exist, the deaths around him had forever distorted him, robbing him of all which constitutes life. “Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, of all eternity, of the desire to live.” (Wiesel, intro)He witness death all round him, from his foremost night in the concentration camp.

On one of their first nights in camp, Wiesel’s father inquired another prisoner for the location of a restroom but was met with a swift slap. Though deeply bothered by it, Wiesel admitted to being paralyzed by fear: “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I watched and kept silent” (Wiesel 39).