Ethos In Elie Wiesel's Speech

The word night ties in with darkness. Darkness, or the absence of light, is used in the book to convey the absence of self, love, peace, happiness, faith, and strength, which were all what the Jewish people lost during the Holocaust. Wiesel’s purpose for using this symbol was to provide the reader with a better understanding of the fear that he felt during his time in the concentration camps. In the Night, Wiesel says “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke.

The Holocaust was an absolutely devastating time period, killing over 6 million innocent Jewish people. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel lived through the tortuous time and wrote a meaningful memoir called Night. He also made a visit to Auschwitz, a concentration camp he stayed at. The visit to Auschwitz was made into a moving documentary called “Winfrey & Wiesel:Auschwitz”. A memoir and a documentary are both ways to convey and expose the events of the Holocaust and their severity.

In Night, a non-fictional novel, Elie Wiesel, the author, recounts his experience with his father at Nazi German concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. A memoir on the Holocaust, the novel addresses the task of describing the indescribable and does it quite well, taking readers on an emotional roll coaster. The novel evokes various feelings including sadness and anger as Wiesel describes explicit details of his experiences during the Holocaust. After reading Night, I felt powerless and depressed as I reflected on my perspective of humanity. I also felt disappointed and frustrated with the details perhaps due to the fact that the details came from a true story.

These similes and metaphors compare the soldiers with various things, as well as the Buchenwald concentration camp with multiple places similar to it. Not only similes and metaphors were used within this poem, but a lot of phrases that represent sympathy from both points of view. Although it isn’t directly said what the American soldiers are thinking about, Elie Wiesel guesses at their feelings through their actions, therefore leading to making connections with his own head. In this poem, this is how the American soldiers reacted when they saw the Hellish living conditions that the Jews were living in. This wasn’t the first bad thing that they’ve seen though, since they have successfully fought in World War II.

In the years of the Holocaust, darkness shadowed the Jewish people. They were forced to be ripped apart from their families, they were starved to the point of death, and they were overall dehumanized. These traumatizing events inspired Elie Wiesel to write his memoir, Night, which caused him to give a detailed record of the horrors of humanity that he endured. This also played a part in his speech “The Perils of Indifference”. Unfortunately, the world is not filled with light.

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Acceptance Speech, Elie Wiesel develops the claim that remaining silent on human sufferings makes us just as guilty as those who inflicted the suffering and remain guilty for not keeping the memory of those humans alive. Elie Wiesel voiced his emotions and thoughts of the horrors done to Jewish people during World War II whilst developing his claim. Wiesel “remember[s] his bewilderment,” “his astonishment,” and “his anguish” when he saw they were dropped into the ghetto to become slaves and to be slaughtered. He repeats the words “I remember” because he and the world, especially those who suffered in the ghettos and camps, would never be able to forget how innocent suffered. Consequently, he emphasized that “no one” has the right to advocate for the dead.

Elie was one of the millions of people who had to go through that and deal with the post-traumatic stress. By the end of his story, his diction and tone expressed true emptiness and sorrow. This is displayed by Wiesel saying “I wanted to see myself hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself in the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.

In the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, he describes the different way war impacted him, and his Alpha brother in short stories. In the stories he elaborates vividly about the different experiences that they lived through. For instance, Tim O’Brien and Norman Bowker had things in common. Certainly they were both consumed with guilt, shame, and remorse. The war had killed them deep inside, where they no longer had sense of any emotion.

He also wanted to tell the reader about his life as a Jew in a concentration camp and the horrors he faced. He wanted us to think about what we would have done in his place and what forgiveness means to us. After he published his book, he asked certain people to respond to the story and what they would have done in his place. Some people are Jews, some are Christians, some are young, some older, some were even part of the war. Everyone who wrote an essay was different from the rest in some way, but they all had one connection, Simon.

Life is all about finding a balance, to get what you need, perhaps in sacrifice of what you want. Thus, history has its reckless balance of tragedy and hope through varying events; testing the strength of humanity in the face of adversity. In “Night” by Elie Wiesel, we get to glimpse the horrors of the Holocaust through the recollections of a survivor. Elie provides us with an emotional recount of his experience, enabling his readers to comprehend the devastating repercussions of this event vicariously. We read as families get ripped apart and demoralized victims lose their faith.