Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the unforgettable tale of his account of the savagery and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a budding Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. He and his family are exiled to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must master the skills needed to survive with his father’s guidance until he finds liberation from the monstrosity that is the camp. This memoir, however, hides a far more meaningful lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation. To develop the theme of denial and its consequences, Wiesel uses juxtaposition and characterization. By using juxtaposition, Elie uncovers the theme of indifference and its consequences. Near the …show more content…
In the beginning of the book, Wiesel tells the story of his mentor, Moshie the Beadle. Because he is a foreign Jew, the Germans chose him and others like him to be deported before the rest of the Jews. When he is deported, he witnesses the terrible slaughter of his people; moreover, his escape was entirely due to him making himself irrelevant, completely unnoticeable. “He had mastered the art of rendering himself insignificant, invisible” (3). After his escape, he attempts to warn the Jews about the nightmare that would soon become a reality. Because he had made himself unseen, unimportant, the people of Sighet disregarded and chose not to believe what he said, in hopes that his fate would not fall upon them. Wiesel writes on page 7, “But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.” However, Moshie the beadle was not the only one driven to insanity. On Elie’s “journey” to Auschwitz by cattle car, he witnesses a woman broken with grief: Mrs. Shachter. She, on page 25, screams, “Jews listen to me! I see fire! I see flames!” Because of this, the Jews in the car went to the extreme extent to beat her in order to keep her silent as a result of the fear of their unknown destiny. How the Jews treated Moshie and Mrs. Shachter
First, the reader views Wiesel’s personality changes as a result of life in Auschwitz. Perhaps the most obvious change is his steadily increasing disinterest of religion. Before his internment, Wiesel demonstrates a growing interest in the religion of his parents. During the day, he studied Talmud, a legal commentary on the Torah, or the Jewish Ten Commandments. At night, he would worship at the synagogue, “to weep over the
The emotional connection Wiesel has to the injustice and inhumane acts from other people being a survivor from the Holocaust
These are used to show drama, side thought, and emotion. “‘The Red Army is advancing with great strides… Hitler will not be able to harm us, even if he wants to…’” (page 8) The author uses ellipses to show side thought, which means that more was said or thought, but the most important information was given to the reader. Wiesel also uses short, and simple sentences to add drama. “I was sixteen.” (page 102) During this part in the story Elie Wiesel had just witnessed a father die at the hands of his son, then his son die at the hands of others. He tells his audience that he is sixteen when this happens. This fact surprises readers and adds both drama, and sympathy. However, other emotions are also invoked in this story such as Anger. “They pray before you! They praise your name!”(page 68) By adding exclamations the author adds intense emotion. This scene creates upsetting emotions for the reader, and also reveals Wiesel's anger with his situation. Wiesel is angry and frustrated at God for everything that he has been put through. He is upset that others are still praying to God, even when God has done nothing to help them. The way that he structures his sentences give a sense of style to his
The appeal to emotion is the strongest by far. It seems almost impossible for a reader not to cry at the words of Wiesel. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. His vivid description of a child being hanged, how he was still alive, “struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes”, truly captures the ghastly occurrences of the death camp. His own discussion of how he had lost faith in a God, and how other sons were leaving or even beating their fathers with no care enlightens the reader to the true despair that surrounded the people that inhabited these camps. Also, his description of himself in a mirror as “a corpse” that “gazed back at me” installs in the reader the overwhelming sense of how this event so completely ravaged the human soul.
In Night by Elie Wiesel, he recounts his experiences in the Holocaust and talks about how many of the people involved–those who could be seen as perpetrators, victims and bystanders alike–and how denial played a key role in their actions in the Holocaust. Wiesel writes about denial so much as a warning to the reader, helping us understand that we need to avoid denial in the modern world and whatever crises we may face; if denial hadn’t been so prominent in the Holocaust, much less people would’ve died. This is clear in Wiesel’s retelling of the events.. Many people were involved in the Holocaust, obviously. Some were just innocent people, pushed into the deadly situation for being who they were; others were people seeking to somehow help themselves
The holocaust is the most deadly genocide in the world that impacted millions of life by controlling and running life because of one mean man. In Elie Wiesel memoir, The Night is describing his own experience before, during and after the holocaust. He describes in meticulous details his experience in the concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Buna with is father. Wiesel depicts how the Nazi slowly destructs every interpersonal relationship in the Jews community. Within the autobiography, Wiesel shows how the interpersonal relationships are important within the population in general, in the concentration camp and in more precisely with is own relationship with his family.
In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.
As the famous journalist Iris Chang once said, “As the Nobel Laureate warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” After experiencing the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel narrated “Night”. Eliezer wrote “Night” in an attempt to prevent something similar to the Holocaust from happening again, by showing the audience what the consequences are that come from becoming a bystander. Elie illustrated numerous themes by narrating the state of turmoil he was in during the Holocaust. In Night, Eliezer provided insight into what he experienced in order to teach the unaware audience about three themes; identity, silence, and faith.
Traumatic and scarring events occur on a daily basis; from house fires to war, these memories are almost impossible to forget. The Holocaust is only one of the millions of traumas that have occurred, yet it is known worldwide for sourcing millions of deaths. Elie Wiesel was among the many victims of the Holocaust, and one of the few survivors. In the memoir, “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, Elie, the main character, is forever changed because of his traumatic experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camps.
At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize
The early 1940s, an observant, young boy, and his caring father: the start of a story that would become known throughout the world of Eliezer Wiesel. His eye-opening story is one of millions born of the Holocaust. Elie’s identity, for which he is known by, is written out word for word his memoir, Night. Throughout his journey, Elie’s voice drifts from that of an innocent teen intrigued with the teachings of his religion to that of a soul blackened by a theoretical evil consuming the Nazis and Hitler’s Germany. Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, examines the theme of identity through the continuous motifs of losing one’s self in the face of death and fear, labeling innocent people for a single dimension of what defines a human being, and the oppression seen in the Holocaust based on the identities of those specifically targeted and persecuted.
Moishe the Beadle was a religious person prior to being taken away to the concentration camp. Even though Moishe was lucky enough to escape from the camp, after witnessing extremely malicious acts he lost his faith. The mistreatment of the prisoners at the camp left a scar on his memory which made him believe that god is unjust, consequently losing his faith. Hence, he felt like life was not worth living anymore.
The Holocaust was a horrific time period when over six million Jewish people were systematically exterminated by the Nazi government. Throughout this period, the Jews were treated particularly inhumane because the Nazi viewed their ethnicities as a disease to humanity. Dehumanization is a featured theme in Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Holocaust since he demonstrated numerous examples of the severe conditions endured by the Jewish people. The nonfiction story Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on inhumanity and reveals human beings are capable of committing great atrocities and behaving cruelly, when such actions are condoned by society, peer pressure, and ethical beliefs. Elie Wiesel uses literary devices to produce a consistent theme of inhumanity.
While Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy subjugated to the violence of the Holocaust in Night, embarks on his atrocious journey in struggling to survive the brutality perpetrated on him, he loses his innocence in the traumatic circumstances. Wiesel’s main aspiration of writing about his development from childhood to adulthood is to showcase how cruelty within society can darken innocents’ souls. As Elie grows throughout the story, he starts to understand that he has changed from a pure, little child to a young man filled with distress and thoughts of danger. He reflects over what kind of individual he has evolved into because of the all the killings and torture he has witnessed: “I too had become a different