Loss Of Faith In Night By Elie Wiesel

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 …show more content…
Towards the beginning of his journey, wiesel started out his day and ended his day with a prayer, and he questioned religion and took great interest in it. “Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don 't understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself,” (Wiesel,5). This piece of evidence supports the idea of Elies ideals on religion and his eagerness to learn. He undoubtedly had faith in a god and before the holocaust he was able to find peace in these unknowns. It also shows his mentality and innocent thoughts before he witnesses atrocities no one should see, let alone a child and question his unshakeable faith. Even undergoing the transition of being forced to leave everything that made him who he was as an individual, he never questioned his faith in god. "Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…May His name be celebrated and sanctified…" whispered my father. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (Wiesel, 33). At this point Elie 's peaceful thoughts on his faith had quickly been replaced with anger. He …show more content…
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

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    He asks him, “What are You, my God... compared to this afflicted crowd, proclaiming to You their faith, their anger, their revolt?” (63). In the quote Elie wonders, how could the Jewish people still pray to God even though He allowed such horrors to be inflicted on his followers? Although many have endured indescribable cruelty, the Jewish people’s proclamation to God “their faith, their anger, their revolt” displays their inner conflict in which they pray to God and simultaneously feel rage towards Him.…

    • 955 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    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
  • Superior Essays

    Jessica R. During the Holocaust, over six million individuals died, many deaths occurred from living in the concentration camps. Within the camps, inhumane acts were performed on the Jewish people. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie’s identity is changing from being religious and a follower of God to not having any faith in God, by staying true to himself and his faith, by dealing with tortious acts and by feeling that God was behind all of the danger. Elie Wiesel 's Identity was always based on a connection with God, during the prison camps Wiesel always stayed true to his identity and kept God within his soul.…

    • 1106 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night Argumentative Essay

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Holocaust Essay The book Night is a book written by Elie Wiesel and it tells his story of his struggles that he went through while enduring the Holocaust. The book “HOLOCAUST BIOGRAPHIES: ELIE WIESEL Spokesman for Remembrance” is a biography written by Dr. Linda Bayer that is about Eliezer’s life during and after the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a period in history when millions of Jews were placed in concentration camps and later slaughtered in many barbaric ways. The ways that people got sent to these camps is if they were prisoners of war, if they were mentally disabled, and if they were Jewish.…

    • 1284 Words
    • 6 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.…

    • 981 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    For example, “As if all the troubles in the world were not already upon us...”(Wiesel 38), this shows that Elie feels as if his world cannot get any worse. Since this quote is early on in the book, it is the beginning of him losing faith in everything, including his religion. Another example of Elie losing his faith in God is whenever he saw God hanging from the gallows with the child. This is a piece of the proof of him believing that the God he once believed in was no longer with him. To conclude, Elie and many other Jews were feeling as if God was abandoning them.…

    • 1106 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night There are many significant events that took place during the Holocaust in the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel. This book was based on the memories from the author which shares unforgetting time frames he, his family, and other Jewish people had to experience. Dehumanization and losing faith in God were two of the main factors that occurred during these times because of the sufferings which Jews endured. Due to the conditions and surroundings Jews lived in, their faith in God was repeatedly being questioned. They did not understand how they lived in a world that was filled with so much hate and evil when they believed in a world that contains love and happiness.…

    • 453 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, faith and religious beliefs start to fade as the Jews struggle for their life during the Holocaust. While in the ghettos, the Jewish people, including Elie, have faith and continue praising God. As a child Elie wants to devote his life to religion and live by the rule of God. Praising God gives the Jews hope of being free again. Even if they have a bad day, they maintain faith in God.…

    • 1201 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie realized that there was a world out there that did not believe everyone was equal and that everyone had to handle it this way. Elie changed his hope on God because throughout the Holocaust, there was no God and nobody has heard from him. Elie saw everyone praying to God and still yet, there was silence. Elie had changed spiritually by seeing the side of Hitler and the SS officers for example, Hitler got soldiers to be on his side and treat people with no respect and give them the worst part of their life all because the one of the controlling men decided he did not like the…

    • 691 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    This is not the end of it however, Wiesel recalls that he had in fact seen the rabbi’s son, he was running ahead during the death march in order to abandon his father who was limping in the back, thus ridding himself of the burden. Wiesel describes his reaction to this shocking revelation;” And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God whom I no longer believed My God, lord of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Elianhou’s son has done”(87). Wiesel was so desperate not to lose his father, and so worried that he himself would give into the temptation of abandoning him that, he prays to a deity in which he does not hold legitimate. Proving that he is willing to do anything that offers even a glimmer of hope to keep his father.…

    • 1782 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    During Elie Wiesel’s time in the Holocaust, from time to time he started to change as a person and started to question the God he praised so much. When the reader first realizes that Elie starts to lose his faith was on the very first night of his time at the camp, “Never shall I forget these moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes”(34). The quote explains when Elie first starts to lose his faith in God when it says that his God was murdered. After that event Elie also starts to begin to give up any kind of hope he might had had. Elie starts to show how much he has already changed after one day in the camp, “I stood petrified.…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Night Literary Analysis Essay What is it like to be surrounded by death, and be unmoved by the thousand of bodies, lying lifeless around you? A german named Adolf Hitler had enslaved all of the Jewish people and developed a plan to exterminate all people of Jewish descent. He placed them in camps and managed to kill six million Jews, two-thirds of the Jewish population using an army of german soldiers. In the memoir “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, the author, along with his father, had lived in one of the camps as an internee, who ten years later, wrote a book on his experiences during this time in history.…

    • 1370 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    On the 30 of January in 1933, the shocking Holocaust starts. The unimaginable vindictiveness was unleashed on the Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party. German troopers rash the pure homes of Jews, compelling them to bow underneath. The Jews carrying on with an ordinary typical life were now presently a target for an inhuman evil man, Adolf Hitler. We read and learn about the terrifying demonstrations in the concentration camps by unique and individual stories from the surviving Jews.…

    • 1094 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Those who have been inspired by the great beings before them will strive to become the epitome of the future and to revolutionize their society into a utopia. They will aspire to reach the greatness that others have achieved throughout history. They will strive to accomplish the unthinkable, and disapproved to support what they believe in, whether it be religion, passion, compromise, or politics. They will create a new generation filled with peace and prosperity, but in order to accomplish it, might be forced into war. They will aim to match the incredibility of their heroes.…

    • 1032 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Night, Elie tells the tale of how he and his fellow Jewish people lived and died, brutally and extremely inhumanely in the German death camps during World War 2 with very vivid imagery and a mesmerizing choice of words. This story was very captivating and hard to put down. It allowed me to truly understand the difficulties faced by Jews during this time. Something I find very intriguing that also happened to be an important theme for Elie’s experience is religion. I am not religious, but I believe in a Creator, and the multitude of possibilities behind the existence of one.…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays