What Is The Purpose Of Night By Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel, a famous author, speaker, and survivor of Auschwitz during the Holocaust, writes and speaks out about the detrimental atrocities that he has survived and tells about those who have not. Through his book and his speeches, his goal is to inform and persuade the people he reaches to speak out against horrors, like the Holocaust, and not let the perils of others go unseen. He says that to ignore these social injustices is to help the abuser and never the victim and in his pursuit of justice for all those who go unseen, he touches millions of lives with his disturbing account of the true tragedies of the Holocaust. In his novel, Night, Mr. Wiesel is informing people of the things he and his family went through in the Holocaust. He …show more content…

There was a pile there already. New suits, old ones, torn overcoats, rags. For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold.”. He recalled how the strong men were taken to burn the bodies of their fathers and the rest were sent to be shaved, “He told us that having been chosen because of his strength, he had been forced to place his own father’s body into the furnace.)” “Belt and shoes in hand, I let myself be dragged along to the barbers. Their clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies. My head was buzzing; the same thought surfacing over and over: not to be separated from my father.” He recalls how they had to run for clothes and for food and for work, “Around five o’clock in the morning, we were expelled from the barrack. The Kapos were beating us again, …show more content…

Wiesel goes on to give two speeches at important places and events, the White House and Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony. In his first speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, he discusses how indifference cannot be a solution and that, to show indifference, is to help the aggressor and never the victim. “And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.” Throughout his speech, Wiesel is telling this story in third person to take away the personal feeling of the speech. He isn’t just talking about himself, but the lives of everyone that was in the camp and all those who died there. “He was finally free, but there was no joy in his heart. He thought there never would be again. Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw. And even if he lives to be a very old man, he will always be grateful to them for that rage, and also for their compassion. Though he did not understand their language, their eyes told him what he needed to know—that they, too, would remember, and bear witness.” His main goal of this speech is to bring light to the fact that when people ignore the troubles of other groups, they are condoning indifference. To condon indifference is to condone the suffering of