Elie Wiesel, And The World Remained Silent?

In Night, fifteen-year-old Elie Wiesel and his father were imprisoned at Auschwitz Concentration Camp. It was here that a young Wiesel witnessed horrendous acts of pure evil. It was at Auschwitz that he called out to a God in his innocence asking for hope. Only to be answered by silence. Following Wiesel’s liberation from the Nazi Concentration Camp, Buchenwald, he began to write out an outline of his experiences. He was hospitalized in April of 1945. It was not until much later that he wrote Un di velt hot geshvign (And the World Remained Silent) in Yiddish. It contained the tone of bitterness, resentment, and anger; Wiesel eloquently expressed how the silence of many led to the slaughter of millions. Much later, Wiesel condensed and translated …show more content…
Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes… children thrown into the flames” (Wiesel 32). This is a memory that has since been ingrained in Wiesel’s mind and a nightmare that haunts his sleep at night (Wiesel 32). At this point, the young Wiesel accepts his new reality; “Never shall I forget the flames that consumed my faith forever” (Wiesel 34). Wiesel not only implies fire symbolizes death, but a consuming death that extinguishes innocence and faith. Wiesel, being a devout Jew, had cried out to God for help and hope for him and his people, but was answered with silence. Wiesel was hopeless, “The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded- and devoured- by a black flame (Wiesel 37).” To Wiesel, the hope and the promise that God had made to his people had “burnt to the ground when Elie witnessed the Germans hurl into the ‘huge flames’ of the furnace a truckload of small children still alive” (Lustiger). Wiesel illustrates through his personal experience the experiences of his people. The innocence and faith that Wiesel lost during the Holocaust represents how every Jew felt. During the remainder of Night, Wiesel enters an …show more content…
Death remains prevalent throughout Night as an everyday occurrence at the concentration camps. Wiesel described in the first chapter the slyness in which death fools the unknowing by recounting his father saying, “‘The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal…’ (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?) (Wiesel 11).” “The narrative is simple, yet its resonance is profound, for the reader knows that this man, lovingly and with a mind that cannot grasp the enormity of the pain that lies before them (Bloom 26).” Wiesel’s father represented the attitude every Jew in the Holocaust had originally expressed at the warning signs, after all, who could predict what would happened? Wiesel became numb to the death that constantly surrounds him, threatening him as its next victim. His apathy was clearly seen as he as his father were transported to a different base camp in Auschwitz, “The inscription [on the sign stated]: ‘Warning! Danger of death.’ What irony. Was there here a single place where one was not in danger of death (Wiesel 40)?” Wiesel began to view death as a casual occurrence (proving his newfound apathy). Although Wiesel found enduring everyday life at Auschwitz easier in a state of apathy, the reality of the death and evil finally began to affect his soul, “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist… To no longer feel anything,