Silence In Elie Wiesel's Night

In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel employs the motif of silence to illustrate the central idea that the true horror of the holocaust is not just what the Nazi’s did, but the behavior that they approved of, as people dehumanized one another with silence, hate and violence. The story begins with Elie Wiesel, the narrator, studying Jewish books in his Hungarian hometown. In 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary and start taking repressive measures against the Jewish people. This quickly turns into something worse and the Jewish people and Wiesel are taken to Birkenau, which is on the way to the Auschwitz concentration camp. At Birkenau, Wiesel and his father are separated from his mother and his sisters, who he never sees again. Wiesel and his father pass the evaluation test, so they are allowed to live and work in the camps. …show more content…
Wiesel also makes clear the hatred shown by some people to others, yet nobody stood up for them. Silence was the best method for survival. The German propaganda made any act of inhumanity acceptable and silence gave them the power to do it. Wiesel’s experience has taught him that the Nazis’ cruelty distorts one’s perspective and creates cruelty among the prisoners. Self-preservation becomes the highest asset in the world of the Holocaust and leads prisoners to commit horrendous crimes against one another as they lose the humanity in there callous will to survive. Wiesel fears that this loss of perspective will happen to him, that he will lose control over himself and turn against his father. In the concentration camps, Wiesel has learned that any human being, even himself, is capable of unimaginable cruelty. He reflects on the fact of how he has changed, his innocence stripped from him changing him into a different person. A person who is so capable of great cruelty and who had to fight hard not to succumb to the