Elie Wiesel Research Paper

“Monsters exist, but there are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” ~Primo Levi. This statement was said about the Holocaust. There are monsters in this world, but the people who believe the monsters and act for them are far more dangerous. It makes sense, doesn’t it? One monster of a man, can hurt some people, but he can be overcome by ordinary people when they work together, and strike at the same time. But what if those people were to obey the monster. To listen to his lies and to believe them, to act for them, to love them, to feel passionately that they are in the right and others wrong, and to be willing kill millions to have other people see their point. That is far more worrisome than a few monsters on their own. This is the scenario that happened from January 30th, 1933 to May 8th, 1945; the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a time when a man named Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, and brainwashed the Germans into following him. He had them believing that communists and Jews needed to be wiped off the earth so that they could conquer the world. He was a monster of a man who got the people same people who could

Elie was short for his real name which was Eliezer. (“Elie”) Elie was a Jew, like the rest of his father, and the majority of his neighborhood. He had three sisters and no brothers. Their family went in age order like this: his father, Shlomo Wiesel, his mother, Sarah Wiesel, Beatrice, Hilda, Elie, and Tzipora. (“Elie”) Elie and his friends often went to have lessons and talk with a man who lived in a monastery but was not Jewish. He taught them many things about life, and helped educate them about things they didn’t learn in school. Elie and his friend’s parents did not like them going to see him. This man was the one who really got Elie to question things in life.