Analytical Essay On Night By Elie Wiesel

Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and beliefs. “I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14). This quote shows how strongly he believed before experiencing the hardships of the Holocaust and it changed him. In the book, Night, the main theme, is religion and belief which is shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazi 's caused.

Life is full of good and bad experiences, but you don’t always have control of what happens. That can be scary sometimes and it depends on how you handle it as to whether you get out of that situation. In the memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel, Eli, a teenager had been taken away from his home and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Night is the scary record of Elie Wiesel’s memories of the death of his own family and the death of his own innocence as he tries to fight his way out of the concentration camp. Over the course of the book, Eli changes from a believer in God living in bearable conditions to someone who has become profane because of the situation he’s been put in. This is important to the book as a whole because it connects to the theme of optimism. The change is apparent when life isn’t going in Eli’s favor, and the life of his father is taken away from him. Deep inside he feels a sign of relief but guilt at the same time.

Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong even to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and belief in God. We learned how strong his beliefs were when he says,“I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14). But then he experiences the hardships of the Holocaust and it abruptly changed him. In the book Night, the main theme is religious belief, shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazis caused.

At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely.

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, conducted a genocide known as the Holocaust during World War II that was intended to exterminate the Jewish population. The Holocaust was responsible for the death of about 6 million Jews. Night is a nonfiction novel written by Eliezer Wiesel about his experience during the Holocaust. Many events in the novel convey a theme of “man’s inhumanity to man”. The prisoners of the concentration camps are constantly tortured and neglected by the German officers who run the camps. The cruelty of the German officers at the concentration camps change Elie’s personality throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Elie is deeply religious and spends most of his time studying Judaism. However, by the end of the novel, Elie believes that God has been unjust to him and all the other Jews, and has lost most of his faith. The cruelty of the German officers also changed the other Jews as well. The events of the Holocaust forces the prisoners to fend for themselves, and not help others.

As stated by Wiesel, at a desperate point Jewish prisoners needed help from God. Elle believed God chose to be silent in a time when people needed him. This drove Elie to thoughts of committing suicide because if God wasn’t helping the prisoners there is no point of living. Elle thought there was no point in thanking God because he believed didn’t do anything to help the prisoners that were praying to him and asking for help. He questioned the reason why people even try to have hope that The Almighty would help them if he wouldn’t even answer their Kaddish to him.(33) Wiesel believed, Elie came close to giving up on hope when a son killed his own father for food on a train to another camp. People gave up on hope and felt no remorse for killing

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when he questioned God, ¨Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled, he caused thousands of children to burn his Mass graves?¨(Wiesel 68). Overall, Wiesel does not follow the words of God and is not believing in him anymore because he thinks God is the one thatś letting all the inhumanity occur.

Elie’s faith towards God changes a lot as the story goes on. In the beginning of the work, his faith in God is complete. In chapter one when asked why he prays to God, he says, “Why did I pray?... Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” His belief in God is great, and he cannot imagine living without faith in his divine power. But his faith is challenged by what he has to go through during the Holocaust.

Within this barbarous world, there are innumerable accounts of devastating events that have occurred in the past, and continue to occur; these occurrences periodically cause us to question the existence of God. Overall, this statement proves to be correct to ill-fated Eliezer Wiesel. This brave child was exceedingly religious, as well as he had a strong hunger to be closer with God. Previous to being transferred to Auschwitz, he believed that as long as his family stuck together, everything would work out to be well. Throughout all his time in the concentration camp, he started to lose his faith after discovering the horrid ways of the camp. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is devoted to his faith, he starts to question God’s existence after witnessing the cruelty at Auschwitz.

One example of Elie losing his faith is when he was questioning his belief in God. "I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God 's mercy? Where 's God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy? (77)." Elie was losing his faith in God. He was suffering and he was wondering where God was at this time as he was suffering. If God truly did exist, then why would He let this happen? Was he trying to test

The first hanging, the Warsaw native who had been in the camp for three years, was fully grown and filled with defiance towards his German captors. He showed no fear of his executors, refused to be blindfolded and before his death, shouted out his denunciation of the action being taken. On page 62 of Night by Elie Wiesel it states “The hangman...was about to signal his aides to pull the chair from under the young man's feet when the latter shouted, in a strong and calm voice: "Long live liberty! My curse on Germany! My curse! My -" The executioner had completed his work.” This opinion of the Germans was shared by Elie and the other prisoners. They agreed with the condemnation of the prisoner and celebrated someone expressing these thoughts.

“You don’t understand...You cannot understand. I was saved miraculously. I succeeded in coming back. Where did I get my strength? I wanted to return to Sighet to describe to you my death so that you might ready yourselves while there is still time...I wanted to come back to warn you. Only no one is listening to me...This was towards the end of 1942”(7). The pattern of faith and belief in Elie Wiesel’s Night is intertwined with the pattern of denial the Jews have throughout the book. In Night, Wiesel has times where the Jews are very optimistic of situations they 're in, even though they shouldn’t be, and the reason for most of their optimism comes from their belief in a god, which is a curse and a blessing.

In chapters 4 to 6 in the novel, “Night”, Elie Wiesel and his father continue to suffer in the grasp of the Germans. Eventually, all the Jews are moved to a new work camp, Buna, where they are overworked and undernourished, and resort to killing each other for pieces of bread.

Elie, once so faithful, is one of the first to lose faith in God due to the horrific sights he sees. After witnessing the bodies of Jewish children being burned, Wiesel writes, “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever” (34). He quite understandably has begun to doubt that his God is with him following the sight of the supposedly chosen people’s bodies being unceremoniously burned. Elie, though, was perhaps not a member of the masses with this belief; in fact, some men were able to hold on to their beliefs despite these horrendous sights. Also near the middle of the book, Wiesel reflects on the faith of other Jews in the face of these events, saying that “some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray...I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). It is apparent here that the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish people’s faith was delayed on some level. Elie refuses to pray to the God that apparently abandoned him. This is personified when he says he doubts that God has absolute justice. Others remain faithful and retain the hope that He is on their side, explaining these happenstances as an example of God’s mysterious ways. While this may as well be the case, Elie stops praying, believing that he has been abandoned. He finds no hope of redemption in the Talmud like

In the span of a lifetime one often faces many adversities that stand within their path.  While some challenges will be overcome easily, others will take a lot more tenacity. When in the face of adversity it is key not to give up. One should always strive to persevere through their hardships, no matter how severe they seem to be. The author of the memoir “Night” Elie Wiesel, vividly describes his experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Elie went through extreme adversity within the camps of Auschwitz yet still managed to persevere. The experiences Elie went through in camp Auschwitz changed him as an individual spiritually; a boy who was once devoted to God ceased to believe in him. Elie also lost his sense of self identity, as his personality completely changes. During his internment at Auschwitz and Buchenwald Elie completely loses his innocence. As a result of the adversity Elie faces throughout his time at the Auschwitz camp, his identity is tarnished and eventually reformed.