Armon Olaee
Ms. Rooney
English 10 Honors Period 5
10 March 2017
The Blessing of Suffering “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” (Friedrich Nietzsche). After surviving the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel uses his woes to find value in his once torn apart life and express his sufferings in his autobiographical memoir, Night. The narrative describes the journey of a young teenage Jewish boy who experiences the horrors and hardships of the Holocaust while imprisoned in concentration camps. Elie endures and witnesses the atrocities of the Nazi forces while he questions his own faith in God, struggle to support his weakening father, and escape death for as long as possible. Undergoing the Holocaust, Elie sees and …show more content…
Along with thousands of other inmates, Elie watches the pipel dangle above the ground as the rope slowly suffocates the life out of him for over half an hour. Elie weeps, “For God’s sake, where is God? There is whereㅡhanging here from this gallows. That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (65). The chilling scene of the child’s lynching crushes Elie’s hope in God immensely. Elie feels as if the SS officers have accomplished murdering God himself and his own innocence. His childhood and values have been slayed by the Nazis and he only senses death around him. As time went by, Elie’s anger for God grew, and as a consequence, his belief in the Almighty faded away. Elie begins to become rebellious towards Judaism in order to express his resentment against the false God. He explained, “I did not fast…. there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my rations of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (69). Elie chooses not to honor and respect God because He has not ended the pain and horror in which Elie witnesses and suffers. He does not stop believing in God, but loses his faith that God is absolutely
Ms. Rooney
English 10 Honors Period 5
10 March 2017
The Blessing of Suffering “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” (Friedrich Nietzsche). After surviving the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel uses his woes to find value in his once torn apart life and express his sufferings in his autobiographical memoir, Night. The narrative describes the journey of a young teenage Jewish boy who experiences the horrors and hardships of the Holocaust while imprisoned in concentration camps. Elie endures and witnesses the atrocities of the Nazi forces while he questions his own faith in God, struggle to support his weakening father, and escape death for as long as possible. Undergoing the Holocaust, Elie sees and …show more content…
Along with thousands of other inmates, Elie watches the pipel dangle above the ground as the rope slowly suffocates the life out of him for over half an hour. Elie weeps, “For God’s sake, where is God? There is whereㅡhanging here from this gallows. That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (65). The chilling scene of the child’s lynching crushes Elie’s hope in God immensely. Elie feels as if the SS officers have accomplished murdering God himself and his own innocence. His childhood and values have been slayed by the Nazis and he only senses death around him. As time went by, Elie’s anger for God grew, and as a consequence, his belief in the Almighty faded away. Elie begins to become rebellious towards Judaism in order to express his resentment against the false God. He explained, “I did not fast…. there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my rations of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (69). Elie chooses not to honor and respect God because He has not ended the pain and horror in which Elie witnesses and suffers. He does not stop believing in God, but loses his faith that God is absolutely