Elie Wiesel Loss Of Faith In Night

During the six bloody years of the Holocaust, over one million children and teenagers under eighteen were murdered. However, many of the children who did survive, were only able to do so through their faith. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Wiesel tells of his experiences during the Holocaust at a young age, mainly exploring his time in Auschwitz. In Night, Wiesel uses Eliezer’s struggle in keeping his faith to show that even the strongest believers could lose their faith in such hard times but that faith is also often necessary for survival. The first day Elie arrived at Auschwitz was also one of his most traumatic. In this section of the book, Elie arrives to his first concentration camp, Auschwitz. Upon his arrival, he is instantly greeted …show more content…
In this section of the book, Elie witnesses a young boy being hanged after being accused of sabotage against the concentration camp’s power plant. Because of how light the boy weighed, it took thirty minutes for the noose to kill him meaning the boy suffered, slipping in and out of death for a horribly long amount of time. Behind Elie, multiple prisoners questioned where God was. Elie responds in his mind with, “‘Where is he? Here he is. He is hanging here on this gallows…’” (62). This quote uses the gallows as symbolism for Elie’s faith in God to show that just as the noose was killing the young boy, it was killing Elie’s faith as well. This moment in the book is the turning point for Elie’s faith and is the point in which Elie almost completely loses his faith that God will save him and the rest of the millions of Jews. After this happens in the book, Elie begins to have some very inhumane thoughts, showing that without faith, it is almost impossible to keep your …show more content…
During this section of the book, Elie tells of a man named Akiba Drumer who would walk about and mope to every prisoner that he couldn’t go on and that he no longer wanted to live. During the selection, Akiba volunteered himself to die. Elie then explains that if Akiba had not lost his faith, he would have survived the selection. “Poor Akiba Drumer, if he could have gone on believing in God, if he could have seen a proof of God in this Calvary, he would not have been taken by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first cracks forming in his faith, he had lost his reason for struggling and had begun to die’” (73). This quote shows that Elie eventually acknowledges that without faith, you begin to lose any reason to live. In this section of the book, Akiba Drumer stands as a reminder to Elie and the other prisoners to not lose faith. Elie realizes that if he lost every trace of faith he had left, he would turn out like Akiba