Night by Elie Wiesel describes his experiences as a Jew in the concentration camps during World War II. During this time, Wiesel witnessed many horrific acts. Two of these were executions. Though the processes of the executions were similar, the condemned and the Jews’ reactions to the execution were different. One execution was the single hanging of a strong giant youth from Warsaw. The Nazis condemned him to death because he had stolen “during the alert” (Wiesel 59). The youth did not seem to be afraid and cursed Germany to the point of his immediate death caused by the snapping of his neck. Wiesel writes “I remember that I found the soup excellent that evening” (60). How could soup taste good after watching someone die? The prisoners had seen and experienced so much brutality, endured repeated beatings, and humiliated beyond imagination, so one more death did not affect them. Their emotions hardened to the point of being non-existent… or so they thought. Although the prisoners seemed hardened and unaffected by death, a different hanging did deeply affect them. In this hanging, three individuals are condemned to die, one of them was a young child with “the face of a sad angel,” for sabotaging an electric power station (Wiesel 60). The …show more content…
It was a new low for the German soldiers to kill a child, and it was this execution that made many of the Jews’ question the presence of God. Wiesel says, “That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (62). They felt remorse at the hanging of the pipel because he had been kind to them and was “loved by all” (Wiesel 60). So even though the prisoners had to watch similar hangings in Wiesel’s Night, they were affected differently by them. Their reactions were a direct result of the difference between the two that were condemned to die. One showed kindness to them while the other was just a thief being executed as an example. Through these executions, emotions hardened, and God’s presence was
Night Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is an award winning autobiography of an Auschwitz survivor. Elie Wiesel has the providence of surviving the horrific experience of being held prisoner in some of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps during WWII. He and his family, being Jewish, were taken prisoner by the Nazi military in 1944, when he was a teenager living in Sighet, Transylvania. His family was immediately separated, and he was left with only his father, whom he travelled with through three concentration camps. It was within the Auschwitz concentration camp and Buna work camp where he and his father suffered through repulsive conditions and witnessed treatment, which would later be known as the Nazi’s “Final Solution.”
Innocent people died for no humane reason. The survivor Emotionally gave up being respectful and kind to other, staying alive was their only thought. Survival means everything to these prisoners, they will do anything to stay
1- Elie Wiesel is comparing the soup to the taste of corpses because before they went to get their soup to eat, they watched the hanging of three bodies, two men and a child. They had to watch the light child struggle for life in the noose, watching him for half an hour up close until he died, no one wanted to see a child get hanged at an age like that. I feel that the emotions Elie is trying to communicate with us is extreme sadness and sorrow not only because of the death of the two prisoners, but because of the death of the boy. This quote to me, means that because of what he saw up close and for a half an hour, the 13 year old boy trying to cling to his life in the noose, had left a bad taste in his mouth for the soup.
In Night, Elie Wiesel uses details to portray his resilience through the hardships of the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, Wiesel has a religious dilemma in which he begins to have doubts on whether God is there in the deathly stressful struggles of the Holocaust. During his first night in Auschwitz, Wiesel sees the “flames that consumed my faith”(34). Wiesel has experienced and witnessed numerous horrors already on the first day, like the immeasurable amount of people that have been thrown into the crematorium.
Here He is- He is hanging here on this gallows…’”(Wiesel 57). This scene explicitly shows that while some prisoners still waited for God, Wiesel had effectively resigned. the hanging of the child was that last straw that told him God was not going to help them. From this point on, Wiesel saw himself as alone, and without the God that he had loved so deeply for his entire life.
This quote shows that the prisoner is rebelling against the Germans. This action gave many people in the camps hope because they are not in a place to rebell. This in a way, restored the prisoner faith and boosted their morale. This is the reason why his soup tasted better. However, during the second hanging, a small child was also sentenced to death.
At times, it appears unviable for one’s life to transform overnight in just a few hours. However, this is something various individuals experienced in soul and flesh as they were impinged by those atrocious memoirs of the Holocaust. In addition, the symbolism portrayed throughout the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, presents an effective fathoming of the feelings and thoughts of what it’s like to undergo such an unethical circumstance. For instance, nighttime plays a symbolic figure throughout the progression of the story as its used to symbolize death, darkness of the soul,
In the novel, “Night” Elie Wiesel communicates with the readers his thoughts and experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel describes his fight for survival and journey questioning god’s justice, wanting an answer to why he would allow all these deaths to occur. His first time subjected into the concentration camp he felt fear, and was warned about the chimneys where the bodies were burned and turned into ashes. Despite being warned by an inmate about Auschwitz he stayed optimistic telling himself a human can’t possibly be that cruel to another human.
The people had already put aside their emotions for others, and began to give up all hope for a better life, and then the public executions made many give up their religious beliefs and hope for a nice afterlife. Whenever the gallows first showed up, and the first hanging of a boy took place, Elie thought, “this boy, leaning up against the gallows, deeply upset me”(Wiesel, 62). The sense of justice and that the good were rewarded and the bad were punished began to fade. The Jews can see that the judges in the camps can do as they please and choose who lives and dies, and that the sentences are not always fair. The crematorium did not involve them looking death in the face, but with the gallows they were dehumanized because they could not look away from the facts that life is not fair and just, and that their beliefs should be doubted.
To begin with, Wiesel could not believe what was happening. He didn’t believe how cruel the Germans were. Wiesel was living a nightmare and couldn’t escape it. For instance, Wiesel stated, “I pinched myself; was I still alive? Was I awake?
Even the most gruesome memories are illustrated in such detail that you have to wonder if it had happened that same day and not several years ago. This can be seen when Wiesel was forced to watch a young boy be hung who he describes as a sad-eyed angel, who hung alive for a half an hour because he was too light to die (Wiesel 65). During this part of the book, the emotions can be read word for word. Along with expressing a surplus of emotion, this is the moment that leads to Wiesel losing his faith in God. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel talks about his desire to learn more about his religion, but as the book progresses, he starts to lose his faith in God.
During the first hanging, people did not feel pity for the man who died, yet they complained that the ceremony wasted them so much time. I believed that, not only the person who complained about the ceremony, all the people in the camp, including Wiesel, had the same kind of emotion without pity and sorrow. All the prisoners in the camp, in order to survive, cared only about what and when they eat and became more and more heartless and selfish. For those people, this hanging ceremony was only a chance to get extra bread and soup. “I remembered that on that evening, the soup tasted better ever…” Wiesel wrote about the taste of soup at that night reflects his reaction to the execution.
Elie Wiesel witnessed numerous hanging throughout his time spent at the Jewish concentration camps, but he chooses to write about only two specific hangings. The first hanging was a man sentenced to death for possession of weapons, but the second hanging was three different people being hanged, but “among them, the little pipel, the sad eyed angel. ”(64) The two hangings were very similar mechanically. In both hangings, machine guns were pointed at the prisoners, the victims denied blindfolds, the victims did not seem fearful, and after the hanging was complete the prisoners had to walk past the dead bodies. Although at surface level they seem more similar than different, but the deeper look that is taken between the two hangings, the more
His combination of appeal and troupes proved to be effective when Leopold and Loeb were gifted life in prison rather than a rope. His plea became an avenue for the digression of capital punishment by creating a sense of shame and sadness in his audience, a result of his ethos and pathos. Darrow’s rhetoric directly saved the lives of two young men as well indirectly saved the lives of many more by creating a negative connotation towards the death
Rhetorical Analysis of “A Hanging” In his personal narrative, “A Hanging”, George Orwell, a renowned British author, who often used his talents to criticize injustice and totalitarianism, describes an execution he witnessed in Burma while serving as an officer in the British Imperial Police. Originally published in The Adelphi, a British magazine, in 1931, the piece was written for educated, politically aware people in England, in hopes of provoking questions regarding the morality of capital punishment, and perhaps imperialist society overall, in those benefitting from such a system. Although he died nearly seventy years ago, his works are still influential and relevant today. Using vivid descriptions and a somber tone, Orwell recreates his experience in a tense narration that clearly shows his thesis concerning the value of human life and the wrongness inherent to a system that dismisses it so casually.