How Did Elie Wiesel Lose Faith

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 …show more content…
The mistreatment of the Jews reached a point where they weren’t even treated like humans anymore. In “The Holocaust in the Stories of Elie Wiesel” Indinopulos explains how the deportation of Elie led a change in his faith when he says that “Wiesel’s childhood faith in the goodness and promise of God was forever shattered when as a young boy he was deported along with his family from their native Transylvania to Auschwitz.” The author comments on this moment, which was only the beginning of Elie’s religious journey caused by dehumanization. In the work camps, prisoners were only given one bowl of soup and a slice of bread each day. Workers at the camps were forced to work long hours of the day, and when they could finally sleep they did so in cramped wooden bunks. Random beatings for no reason were not rare at these camps. In Wiesel’s book Night he recalls a time when one of the men in charge beat him when he says, “He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest on my head throwing me to the ground and picking me up, again, crushing me with ever more violent blows until I was covered in blood” (53). The man that beat him had no reasoning behind this violent outburst but he was simply venting his built up