Examples Of Emotional Death In Night By Elie Wiesel

Improved Essays
Think of a time when life was so terrible that you felt dead and just wanted it to be a dream. Several people in the book Night, by Elie Wiesel go through many terrible experiences, and are beaten alive while trying to survive the concentration camps during the Holocaust. In the world today, there are many tragedies that happen every single day such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and fires, where people lose friends, families, homes and their valuables. The theme “Emotional Death is very evident in the book night by Elie Wiesel, and is still very evident in the world today.
The first example from Night of the theme “Emotional Death” is when Moishe was trying to warn others about the concentration camps, but no one would listen. Moishe the Beadle
…show more content…
The first thing Elie saw when he arrived at a concentration camp in Auschwitz. The first thing Elie saw when he arrived to Auschwitz was huge flames arising from a ditch. “Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies!” (Wiesel 32). Elies didn’t believe his eyes, that babies were being thrown into a fire and being burned alive while the world was kept silent. If only Elie and others would have believed Moishe the Beadle, these lives would had been saved. Any one of these babies could have found the cure for cancer or changed the world we know today. But those innocent babies were being buried. 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 …show more content…
Elis and his father, Shlomo, finally arrived in Buchenwald, but Shlomo was starting to give up, he became weak and Elie encouraged him to keep walking but he wouldn 't listen. “I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death he had already chosen” (Wiesel 105). Shlomo just wanted to lay down, he was vulnerable, and he just wanted water to drink. All Elie could think about was his father for the last six months in the concentration camps. But Elie started giving up on his father for the first time he didn 't want to give Shlomo water because it was the worst poison for him. They got into their bunks, all night long Shlomo was moaning, but Elie became impassive. The next morning when Elie woke up, Shlomo was gone, he was taken to the crematorium possibly alive. People can only take beatings, starvation, and distress so long before your sole starts to give up, and even in the world today, hundreds of people surrender their lives a day because they can no longer take the stress. To conclude, at the end of the book Night, Shlomo gives up on his life after feeling emotionally

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Terror is one of the main themes in the book “Night”, for as the events Elie went through in the concentration camp are true terror and horrifying. The first example to play in the theme of terror in “Night” would have to be when Elie first arrives to the concentration…

    • 1420 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Night, Elie Wiesel explains his sinister experience of the concentration camps and its ruthless captors. When Wiesel witnessed the deaths and tortures of his race, he became bitter and pessimistic. When he watched the Jews burn, starve, or beaten to death by the captors, Wiesel felt that God was no longer on the Jews’ side. He felt that all hope was lost and that his death was near. Wiesel expresses his emotion and experience through figurative language, such as the Jews’ lives, loss of faith, and empathy.…

    • 771 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie has many opportunities to help his father get stronger but then the head of Elies block tries to get him to take care of himself and forget about others by saying, “Don’t forget you’re in a concentration camp. Here, every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else” (Wiesel 105). Elie is being told that he needs to depend on himself and if he wants to make it out alive he needs to put himself first. The head of the block then goes on by saying, “there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends. Everyone lives and dies for himself alone” (105). Although Elie wants to give all his time and energy to help his father get better, the head of the block is telling him that it does not matter that he is his father, he needs to focus on himself. It is survival of the fittest in these concentration camps and even though no one wants to fight alone they almost have too. No matter how many times others tell Elie to focus on himself he continues to stay by his father, “he works and prays to maintain the strength not to forsake his father as these other sons did. "I was his only support," he says of his father” (Gale Virtual). A big part of Elies life before the concentration camp was praying and his family always had his back. Now it was time for Elie to show his dad that he had his back and was going to stand by him until…

    • 1285 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Elie and his father can be compared to most other father and son bonds around the world, a relationship filled with great care and affection for each other. However, Wiesel chooses to include the changing relationship in his book to explain that the hatred involved in the concentration camps can alter even the strongest loving connections between two people. When Shlomo is on his death bed and is in a dire need for attention and help, he calls out to Elie. Wiesel writes, “He called out to me and I had not answered… if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!” (Wiesel 112). Elie’s feelings change because he no longer cares for his father with the same affection as before the camps due to the drastically different circumstances. As Shlomo “called out to” Elie, he does not answer. Elie “had not answered” because it is too much effort to answer his father and care for him when Elie’s energy levels are very low and he needs to preserve his energy for himself. Because of this selfish yet survivalist action, Elie’s father dies and is taken away over the night, and when Elie wakes up in the morning he is sorrowful, but he is relieved and he says that he is “free at last” from the weakness of his…

    • 1417 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night Argumentative Essay

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages

    While Elie was in the camp, he observed a substantial amount of brutality. He had oversaw his dad get beat, starved, and robbed. He also felt the weight of having to survive and help his father on top of that. Many other people did go through the Holocaust as well, but after being in the concentration camps for a short period of time, those same people ended up killing their fathers in order to survive. But while Elie was in the camp with his dad, he helped him stay alive. He did think that his dad was a burden that he was caring around, but he still helped his only family member. When Elie was in Auschwitz his dad got deathly ill and he was told “Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give your good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father… You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact you…

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A man had told Elie and his father to lie about their age and occupations. Elie saying he was a farmer and he was 18 instead of 15 and his father saying he was a farmer and he was 40 instead of 50. This caused tension because they were heading for the crematorium (where they burned the bodies of those who were too weak to work). Such a foul act by the Germans. Elie and his Father had seen babies and young children being thrown into a big flaming pit of death. Elie wondering if this was a nightmare he kept trying to wake up but nothing would come of it. Now being forced into the barracks they were to sleep on layers of wood with the concentration camp clothing and shoes they were given when they arrived in…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Holocaust Survivor Elie Wiesel once stated, “God is right, or God is just- even during the Crusades we said that .... But how can you say that now, with one million children dead?” (Berger). Throughout Elie Wiesel’s experience at the concentration camp in Auschwitz, his faith in God slowly diminished, but hope approached the millions of Jews once more in the year 1945. The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, tells the story of a boy, Elie Wiesel, and the separation of his family, when they are sent to concentration camp, Auschwitz. Elie is left with nothing but his father and his hope that they would soon leave the camp. As time goes on at the camp, Elie, his father, and many other Jews are worked to death and mistreated causing the majority of them…

    • 981 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie was once a very pious young boy devoted to the study of his Jewish religion. This image of his God changed near completely as he entered Auschwitz. Mr. Wiesel stated, “For the first time, I felt…

    • 666 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    By the time Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel was sixteen, he had witnessed the worst evils that humanity has ever had to offer, the Nazi Regime and The Holocaust. A dark time in history that had killed God in the eyes of over six million Jewish men, women, and children. Certainly the death of a god is enough to shake a boy to his core, but the death of a father is enough to shatter him. Wiesel records how he was forced to endure these events, and so much more in his memoir Night. Elie Wiesel was deported from his home as a youth and shipped to the death camp that has become infamous throughout generations for its cruelty, Auschwitz. Shortly after arrival, Wiesel was stripped of nearly everything including…

    • 1782 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The metaphors and imagery create a dark and mournful tone that conveys the suffocating feeling of impending death. Elie Wiesel uses many different metaphors in the story Night that create a dark feeling to show us what the environment is like, as he experiences it himself. The use of imagery is shown throughout the story as Wiesel explains his observations and experience, but also describes other subjects at the camp that let the reader visualize how hostile the camp was. As this dark and mournful feeling run throughout, we learn how scarred the Jewish people ended up as they had to watch many other citizens be burned to death and as they had to survive many long days without food, water, and the feeling of hopelessness.…

    • 208 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout Night, you can see that all that is keeping Elie going is his father. He specifically states after his father’s death that “nothing matters anymore(113)”, but many did not have any family shortly after arriving at the concentration camp. Family keeps people going and gives one goals and aspirations, and without that, what can one do? People need relationships to want to live, to give themselves meaning. Building relationships is a very important task in the rehumanization process. Along with relationships, a stable environment is also needed to stay mentally fit. I would say that the prisoners visiting so many different concentration camps(98) is part of the torture that the Nazis have planned, for it is very difficult to be changing from horrible circumstance to horrible circumstance. Not only can such a fluctuant lifestyle break one’s mental state down, but for many, their faith in God is like family to them. During the selections, a Rabbi had said to Elie that “God is no longer with us(76)”. This sentiment was not only shared by him, but by many other prisoners in the…

    • 737 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie Wiesel’s well-known book Night is based on his own terrifying experience with his father at the Nazi Germany concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald from 1944 to 1945 in the midst of the Holocaust and the Second World War. In as little as 100 short pages of scarce and fragmented narrative, he writes about the demise of God and loss of humanity, which is reflected in the inversion of the father son relationship as Wiesel’s father’s gradually declines into a state of despair and Elie becomes his indignant caregiver. The memoir tells more than just a story: it tells of the loss of spirit, faith the horror of death and continuing to live with the horrible memoires that continue to haunt…

    • 123 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Before he was put into concentration camps, Elie, along with his entire town, were very optimistic about the war, because they thought the war was going to end shortly. Towards the beginning of the book Elie’s father talks about how the yellow stars of David that was mandatory for all Jewish people to wear wouldn’t kill anyone, but they foreshadowed how the jewish community would be treated in the future. One of the first things that started to eat away at Elie’s faith was when he was separated from his mother and youngest sister and mother, not knowing that that would be the last time he would see them. Another puncture in his faith was when he was stripped of all of his clothing and valuables like they were useless dogs. Elie’s faith was then hit with another bombshell when the young pipel of the Oberkapo of the fifty second Cable Kommando was hung for stashing weapons. The final piece of his faith was crushed when his father died in front of him. After Elie finally lost his faith he looked at the world very pessimistically. Through all the death and destruction he witnessed in the concentration…

    • 1275 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    While in the camp, the Jews were abused, starved, and murdered. By the end of the book, Wiesel has adopted an indifferent attitude toward his own life. He writes, “It no longer mattered. After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore” (Wiesel,107). Previous to his father’s death, there were times when Elie watched the Nazis abuse his father and, though he did not react, he felt remorse, anger, and a desire to “sink my nails into the criminal’s flesh” (Wiesel,37) to defend his father. These indecisive thoughts on whether he should try to help his father or ignore it and survive just like everybody else during these times. Elie and his father were side by side for the majority of the holocaust and they constantly aided each other. But once his father had fallen ill, Elie often questioned whether his father was worth holding onto. This was a normal thing in the holocaust and the reason Elie regretted having those thoughts was because in jewish culture, family was a key part of it and wishing death upon your loved ones was shameful. But the indifference of whether or not he lived after the idea of his father 's passing allowed him to quickly adopt the idea of his own death.” I remained in Buchenwald until April 11. I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer mattered. Since my father 's death, nothing mattered to…

    • 1096 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the first place, when Elie and his father first arrived at camp, one of the soldiers struck Elie’s father, and Elie thinks to himself, “What had happened to me? My father had been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday. I would have dug my nails into these criminals flesh. Had I changed that much?”(p.39). Elie had been dehumanized early on in the camp. This quote shows not only how Elie has changed, but also that Elie realizes that he has changed. He allowed himself and his father to be brutally hit and to suffer the wrath of the Germans. Elie had changed spiritually because all of the pain and suffering around him had broken him and made him lose his faith. He had been so dehumanized that he allowed himself to watch his father be hit and not retaliate in any form. He had fallen prey to fear of the German Nazi soldiers. Elie had changed mentally because he no longer had a mindset to love and protect his family like he did before they came to the camps. Furthermore, after a few days of living in the concentration camps, Elie states that “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my stale crust of bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life. I was nothing but a body, Perhaps, even less, a famished…

    • 1370 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays