Immaculee Ilibagiza's Experiences In Night By Elie Weisel

The experiences of individuals in a time of evil are able to transform their character. The book Night by Elie Weisel brings about the genocide experience of his character during the Holocaust. Another individual named Immaculee Ilibagiza went through the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Both of them had went through extreme pain and problems, transforming their personalities in many ways that are both similar and different. In the book Night by Elie Weisel, the narrator went through many different experiences during the Holocaust. There were three major experiences, however, that changed him as a person. The first experience was in Buna, a concentration camp, where the death of three of the prisoners there was organized because when the power …show more content…
One experience she faced was on the day that the genocide began, when Immaculee 's father told her to run to the pastor 's house and beg him to hide her. Though the pastor was a Hutu, he was a good friend of the family for a long time. He put Immaculee and six other women in a small bathroom where they hid from Hutu militia as well as the pastor 's family for 91 days. She admitted that she was shaking when she came to him (Left to Tell: Immaculee Ilibagiza). In the bathroom, the women were packed tightly together and could not speak or use the bathroom. The women did not eat often and practically starved for the majority of their hiding. Another major experience for Immaculee was after three months, when the French troops arrived in Rwanda, they created a camp to protect the remaining Tutsis. At dark, the pastor took the women out of hiding and snuck them into the French compound. This experience was Immaculee’s realization that she was finally safe and free. She found out, though, that her two brothers and her parents were murdered in the …show more content…
I understood more about the Holocaust from the point of view of someone who was actually there. I could relate more to Weisel and his character while reading Night, especially because there was one character. Instead of reading about statistics on the Holocaust, which does make me very surprised, I feel more emotional when reading from the point of view of just one character and his emotions. I was also able to learn about the Rwandan genocide, which I didn’t hear at all about until I was able to research it. I found out so much about it and learned about what it was like to live through it from the eyes of a survivor, Immaculee. This investigation and reading, on both the Holocaust and Rwandan genocide, were very enlightening. It helped me see that despite the location and time period a genocide may be in, human beings and their ability to survive evil are very