Analysis Of Elie Wiesel's Night

Improved Essays
Imagine a place where children killed their elders for crumbs, a place where hundreds of people were killed and abused daily. That was what happened daily at the concentration camps Elie Wiesel and his father had to suffer through. Night is a nonfiction memoir of the author, Elie Wiesel’s, terrifying experiences inside the Nazi concentration camps. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, Elie metaphorically dies and is reborn as a different person after suffering through the concentration camps of the holocaust.
Before Elie suffered in the concentration camps, Elie was a religious, innocent child. While in Sighet, Elie was extremely devoted to his religion. In Elie’s memoir, he says, “I was almost 13 and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and
…show more content…
During the concentration camps, Elie starts losing his faith in God. Throughout the terrible camps, Elie saw some terrifying things that no teen should ever see. These things caused Elie to rethink his idea about his religion, “Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days?”(Wiesel 67) This evidence shows that after seeing Jews being murdered indiscriminately, it made him rethink if there really is a God, or if he is actually as good as people say he is. Also, Elie becomes an emotionless person from the events he wants through during the Holocaust. “All day I plodded around like a sleepwalker.”(Wiesel 25) This shows that after finding out about his father being selected, he refuses to be sad and chooses to blocks out all of his emotions instead. “Our minds numb with indifference. Here or elsewhere, what did it matter?”(Wiesel 98) This shows that after suffering through so much he knows the best thing to do would be to block out everything and become an unemotional robot. As can be seen, the concentration camps caused Elie to become a faithless, emotionless …show more content…
After the Holocaust, Elie becomes more empathetic, “I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Our ship’s passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the ‘Natives,’ who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure to this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other.”(Wiesel 100) Elie had empathy for the natives because he had first-hand experience with the same cruelty that the “natives” faced, but in his case, it was bread instead of coins. So Elie knew what would happen if it continued, and that one of them would end up hurt. So he stops the women before one of them gets seriously hurt. If Elie never went through the Holocaust and having first-hand experience with the German workers and their taunting, you can infer that nothing would have happened and Elie would have just ignored it. In addition, Elie Wiesel regains his faith and, becomes more devoted to his religion than he has ever been. “From 1972 to 1978, Wiesel was a Distinguished Professor of Judaic Studies at the City University of New York.”(https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Wiesel.html). This proves Elie Wiesel went back to devoting himself to study and learn more about his religion, Judaism. To sum up, Elie becomes a mature, faithful adult after suffering through the

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    His faith was so strong that he wanted to become a Kabbalists at the age of 13 something that had never been done before. Elie’s faith diminishes very rapidly in these traumatic…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The harsh and dreadful conditions of one’s setting or surrounding can drastically affect the way that person thinks and acts towards certain topics. Through the condensed memoir entitled Night, written by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, it is evident that Elie’s tough and emotional journey affects the person he becomes towards the end and after his exposure to the concentration camps. The novel illustrates how the numerous monstrosities Elie endures through his times at the camps change him into the person he is today. Elie explains through his in depth analysis of his experiences that horrifying conditions in the nightmarish concentration camps of the Holocaust can reach and shatter the concerns and ideals held close to a person’s heart. Throughout…

    • 1417 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie felt dead inside from there on. Many tragic incidents happen in the world today including murder, I think of the concentration camps to be much like abortions, because abortion is murder of an innocent child. In summary, as Elie arrives at the camp of Auschwitz, he is starting to feel emotionally dead inside because those helpless babies thrown in the fire were being killed because they were…

    • 1192 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night Argumentative Essay

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The fight did not end after the Holocaust; it only got worse. “Wiesel explained in All Rivers Run to the Sea that although the survivors felt greatly relieved to be safe at last, they ‘were not happy’ and wondered whether they would ever feel joy again. The reign of terror had ended, but for many-like Elie- liberation came too late. He was an orphan, alone in the world, searching for relatives and a place to go.” (ELIE WIESEL Spokesman for Remembrance, Dr. Linda Bayer, 62) After the Holocaust, Elie had a battle to face to live without his parents and for the longest time, he believed that he was the only one left from his family.…

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Before entering and experiencing the horrific events that took place in the concentration camp, Elie is a student of the Talmud. He has so much faith in God in the beginning, but throughout the book he gets furious with God for not doing anything to stop the cruelty. The SS officers did awful actions to the Jews for the littlest things and killed Jews in front of the other Jews causing Elie to lose faith in God, which has a huge impact on his identity. In the beginning of the book, his faith in God and family takes up a lot of his identity, but because of the loss of faith in God and his family, he sees nobody in himself. His identity is nothing at all, he does not care anymore, does not have feelings, and only lives for…

    • 1150 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    At the pinnacle of the holocaust, in 1944, thousands of Jewish people were deported from their homes and countries and separated from their families. One of the thousands of Jews was a boy named Elie Weisel. Elie and his father were put into a concentration camp after they were split up from his mother and sister who they never saw again. Little did Elie know he was about to go through so much pain and suffering that he would eventually lose his faith that was once so strong. Because of the suffering and dehumanization he was faced with at prison camps during the holocaust, Elie Weisel’s religious beliefs began to change and he eventually completely lost his faith in God; many other Jews lost their faith as a result of what they experienced…

    • 1002 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The novel Night was written as a first hand account of the actual events that took place during the Holocaust nearing the end of the Second World War. This account of the Holocaust underlies themes, not only of the Holocaust, but also of World War 2 itself. Some of these themes include the theme of darkness, not just the title of the story, but the physical and non-physical senses of the word. Another of these themes includes faith, particularly in Judaism, but also religion all across the world as they pertain to various ethical and moral decisions.…

    • 712 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    How Wiesel Changed The holocaust: In my essay I will recount the events that happened to Elie Wiesel, the survivor of Buna, Buchenwald, and the infamous Auschwitz. Imagine being shamed for your beliefs and forced to renounce your God and still, even after all this, taken to a foreign place where you are meant to die. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel he tells his story of how the holocaust changed him.…

    • 541 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    During World War II, many atrocities occurred to the Jews living all across Europe. Hitler created huge concentration camps so devastating they were stated to be “hell on earth.” The story of Elie Wiesel is a truly horrifying and emotional journey. During his stay in a selection of concentration camps, he has lost faith in his fellow man, god, and himself; making him nothing more than a mere skeleton of the young man he used to be. The book Night Wrote by Elie Wiesel himself is a personal reflection of the pains suffered during the Holocaust.…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night Elie Wiesel Journey

    • 732 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Night Looking deeper into this memoir, one can see that the traumatic journey had a great effect on Elie physical, mental, and spiritually. Some may say that Elie lost his faith in God during his endeavors in the concentration camp, but personally I would disagree he completely loses his faith. Ultimately, I do not think Elie lost his faith throughout his journey, although certain situations in the book lead the reader to believe that Elie had finally had enough. Many times Elie questioned God’s plans for him and the rest of the Jews.…

    • 732 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them.” For this reason, the conditions in the concentration camps were gradually taking away Eliezer’s every quality and attributes that made him human. For example, in the novel Night, Elie lost his sense of self during the Holocaust through his suffering and despair because his identity gets stripped away, he lost his connection and his faith in God, and he no longer cared about anyone but his own survival. The first example of how Elie lost his sense of self during the Holocaust was when his identity was stripped away.…

    • 1171 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.(109)” Throughout Night by Elie Wiesel, Nazis show time and time again how relentless they will be with their physical and emotional abuse towards prisoners in concentration camps. Through understanding the ways Nazis dehumanize Jews and other minorities, we can see three very important steps to bringing them back into normal life: Non physically abusive treatment, giving them goals, friends, a reason to live, and a non-fluctuant lifestyle, and providing former prisoners with more diverse lifestyle choices. One of Nazi Germany’s most well known ways of dehumanizing people is by physically abusing them.…

    • 737 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Approximately 1 out of every 6 Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner was murdered, fortunately Eliezer Wiesel defeated those odds and came out of it as a survivor. The book ‘Night’ is a memoir written by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who paints a clear picture on his experience of being forced to leave everything that made him who he was, to coming out of the camp: Auschwitz-Birkenau, nearly on the brink of death. His book demonstrates the callousness of the Nazi party and the suffering he and his people faced day and night, never getting a break from the experimental torture, gas chambers, starvation, illnesses and death knocking at their door. Being a prisoner at Auschwitz, Wiesel 's overall identity took a turn as he lost his faith in god…

    • 1096 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Simply display that, Elie has lost his character, to the point that he is evading others like a creature of an outcast, but still having comprehension in how to keep the nature to survive. This steadiness demonstrated that he never could give up life. Elie by one means or another pushed past the Nazi furiousness to survive the nonattendance of strong sustenance torment. Certainly, even as his feelings close down to the point where he couldn 't wail for his dead father, he was closing down so he could survive the experience of the concentration camps. By doing whatever he foresaw that would so he could survive, Wiesel 's personality had changed simply because he has lost his…

    • 1020 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    This book demonstrated the changes that Elie had been through. Elie’s changes are seen through his writings in the book and through his attitude…

    • 1370 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays

Related Topics