Elie Wiesel, author and victim of the Holocaust wrote the novel Night which portrays his experiences in the Holocaust. During the Holocaust the Nazis dehumanized many groups of people, but primarily the Jewish people. Elie writes about his personal journey through the Holocaust, and how he narrowly escaped death. In Elie’s novel he also provides detailed descriptions of what the victims of the Holocaust had to suffer through, and the different ways the Nazis made them feel like nothing more than animals that are meant to be used for work and slaughtered.
One of the first things that Elie and the other Jewish people from his village have to suffer through is riding in a cramped cattle car, as if they were animals. Elie and roughly around another 79 people were shoved into
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The Red army started advancing quickly towards Buna, and the Jews must evacuate. Elie and the other Jews then march through extremely frigid weather, and the SS officers expected them not to stop until they were told. They practically run, and if they stumbled or stopped, they either got shot or trampled. Elie did an excellent job at elaborating on the horribleness of it all, he explained, “I don’t think he was finished off by an SS, for nobody had noticed. He must have died, trampled under the feet of the thousands of men who followed us.” The Nazi officers wanted the Jewish men to march like they were animals, and to not stop until they deemed fit. The Jewish were also marching in freezing weather, and had no food or drink while they were marching. They were expected to be like machines, and if they failed as machines, they were simply finished off by the SS. Elie described, “When the SS were tired, they were replaced. But no one replaced us. Chilled to the bone, our throats were parched, famished, out of breath, we pressed
Is it not perplexing to think about what the Holocaust was like? Elie Wiesel knows from first hand experience. He survived in a concentration camp and was freed by American troops after about a year. Wiesel recounted his experiences in his memoir Night. Students should continue to read Night because the anecdote shows what the Holocaust was like, it shows many of the historical events of World War II as they relate to the concentration camps and many important aspects of Jewish culture.
By the end of the trip, when they arrived in Buchenwald, only a dozen out of the starting train made it out alive. Chapter 8: Free at Last Elie’s father was suffering from dysentery and got beat by the SS soldier and was dying. After all they had been through, this journey through their misery; they had stuck together and been there for one another.
They had terrible living conditions, some died from starvation, and others died from disease. The gardes splitted the Jews into five rows for counte off. When they had to leave the Ghettos eighty Jews were loaded into each of the cattle cars, on their way to the camps. When Elie and the others make it to the camps some of them have to go to the infirmary, from the little food they had on the cattle cars. There were around 20,000 camps but the main ones were Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka.
Despite everything that happened to him, he survived to see freedom; a task that not many did. Living a quiet and peaceful life, Elie’s town doesn’t see the Germans as a threat when they peacefully infiltrated their town. However, they began enforcing rules and move the Jews into ghettos.
In the memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel, he and his family were taken from their home in Sighet, Transylvania. This memoir takes place in around 1941, a few years after the Holocaust began. The first event that led to all of this is when Moshie the Beadle and the foreign jews were taken to dig their own graves. Elie and his family were transported in cattle cars to a concentration camp, called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Once they got to Auschwitz they read the sign that's above the gate, the sign said “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.”
The tests that they had to go through was not easy for some of them. Many jewish people didn’t make it into the concentration camps because of their health and their age. The jewish people and many other races had to go through terrifying acts like beatings, gas chambers, starvation, etc. In the text of the book Night Elie gets his number called.
Then things got worse and Jewish leaders were arrested along with taking away any gold, jewelry, or valuables the Jews owned, and they were made to wear a yellow star. Then the Jews were forced into two ghettos within their village. All the while, Elie and his family as well as many other Jewish families made no attempt to disobey the Germans and Hungarian police. Elie claimed at this time they were living in a state of delusion. Then the Jews were transported to Auschwitz by cattle cars fitting eighty people to each one with little food or water.
Only those who were able-bodied would be allowed to live and be fed. Elie and his father pass the first selection and before they go to the prisoner barracks, they stumble upon the open-pit furnaces where the Nazis are burning babies by the truckload. In camp, Elie and his father, work hard to get almost no food and shelter. Slowly, Elie loses his faith in God and
Five years later, the Wiesels and other jews in the city of Sighet were segregated into a closed off subdivision called the ghettos. After being transported to different ghettos throughout towns and cities, they were all forcefully loaded into crowded cattle cars. Traveling through Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland to get to an unknown destination, in a mobbed train car, with an insufficient amount of food and space, is what the throng of people had to endure if they had any want for survival. Upon arriving at Auschwitz, the throng of Jews were divided by gender. As he watched his mother and three sisters walk away, not knowing if they will ever see each other again, Elie was conflicted with the thoughts of suicide as he sees horrific scenes play out in front of
In this book Elie speaks of his hardships and how he survived the concentration camps. Elie quickly changed into a sorrowful person, but despite that he was determined to stay alive no matter the cost. For instance, during the death
In Night. People in concentration camps tried to protect each other but struggled very hard to do so. Sometimes, they barely had a chance to begin with. For example, Elie witnessed someone kill himself because they already committed all he had left to taking care of a family member and was stuck. “A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father?
World War II had been raging for two years and was bout to enter Sighet. The Germans attempted to commit genocide on the 'lesser ' races, particularly Jews. Through the brutality witnessed, acts of selfishness, the death of his father, and the loss of his faith, Elie changed. Elie became a young man with a strong sense of mortality through it all. By the end of the war, Elie claimed to see himself as "A corpse contemplating me."
The soldiers without even a single thought threw the babies up and shoot them as if though this was a sport. This was shown so the prisoners would be even more scared in the camp. With all of this going on Elie didn’t lose his
Night has revealed to me the immensity of the suffering and ruthlessness that Jews were subjected to on daily basis during the holocaust in an emotional and moving first-hand experience. I choose a train, symbol of oppression, to represent the initial separation from a normal life in which everyone inside the crowded train car received, along with a taste of the pain and suffering that was soon to be forced upon them. I choose this quote to show how shocking mentally and physically the transition phase was from a normal life to that of the oppressed and to emphasize how easily he gave up in the beginning. Despite this, he managed to persevere and overcome the enormous challenges of surviving in a concentration camp.
In a span of 10 years, the Holocaust killed over 7 million people, that’s just as much as the population of Hong Kong. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel shares his experience on how he survived the Holocaust and what he went through. How he dealt with the horrors and even to how he felt of his dad’s death and how he saw himself after it was all over. As he tried to publish it he was constantly turned down due to the fact of how horrid and truful it was. He still tried and tried until it was finally published.