The Real Effects Of War In Elie Wiesel's Night

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The Real Effects of War In his novel, Night, Elie Wiesel describes his experiences as a victim in a concentration camp during the Holocaust of World War II. The following passage illustrates one of the effects caused by war, emotional death, “Outside, the SS went by, shouting: ‘Throw out all of the dead! All corpses outside!’ The living rejoiced. There would be more room” (99). As indicated in the passage Elie Wiesel is recounting the celebration of dead people being disrespected. The idea of rejoicing in corpses being thrown out represents how extreme the situations have become and that the soldiers must only care about themselves in order to survive; however, it exemplifies how inhuman cruelty within war causes emotional death. In the face …show more content…
The Holocaust, led by Adolf Hitler, is an important example of tyranny. In Night, Elie Wiesel experiences emotional death from the Holocaust, “To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter” (64). Elie did not care about the adults being hanged, yet he cared about the child being hanged. This represented how Elie stopped valuing death because the inhuman cruelty from the Holocaust caused him to lose his sympathy for adults, but to be so cruel to a child caused him to feel emotions that he had not felt in the past. Consequently, Wiesel experienced emotional death because before the child was hanged, he was oblivious to his emotions. Elie continues to describe his emotional death, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (115). Wiesel compares himself to a corpse because of the lack of nourishment in his body, but also because of the death of his internal being. Books from World War II reveal the deep psychological damage from cruel experiences, like Elie in Night. Interviews from the Korean War also shed light on why soldiers experience emotional

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