The Holocaust was a horrific event, allowing millions of Jews to die or suffer. The tragic event separated families, not being able to see them ever again. However, in the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel and his father relied on each other and as a result, develops a strong father-son relationship. Wiesel and his father develop a strong father-son relationship throughout Night, experiencing horrific events during the Holocaust. Wiesel's relationship with his father progresses from a codependent relationship to a relationship where Wiesel believes his father is decreasing Wiesel's rate of survival.
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.
When the Oberkapo was arrested on suspicion of sabotage and evicted from the camp, however, the Gestapo continued to question the boy and finally convicted him of the compliance in the efforts to hide weapons that had been found in a building under the Oberkapo’s supervision. There was no showcase of defiance before the boy died. There was no celebration among the prisoners as they had recognized the inhumanity and injustice of the execution of this child. However, there came the realization of the ultimate cruelty of his death. On page 65 of Night by Elie Wiesel it states “the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing...And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.” This had reinforced Elie’s growing conviction that God was dead, that there was no purpose in praying to God or calling up God’s promises to His people because He had abandoned them. On page 65 of Night by Elie Wiesel it states “That night, the soup tasted of corpses.” After witnessing the execution, Elie feels like death is everywhere, and he is unable to enjoy his soup knowing that all goodness has been
In this memoir, Elie Wiesel uses imagery in order to develop the presence of animal-like behavior on people when they are being dehumanized. At this point of the story, Elie and the other prisoners are in a wagon traveling to a different concentration camp, and they are trying to survive in inhuman conditions. To begin, Wiesel describes, “We were given bread… We threw ourselves on it… Someone had the idea of quenching his thirst by eating snow.”( Wiesel 96). This fact emphasizes the alternatives they have to take just to survive because as animals do, that is the only thing they can look forward to. Later, when the wagon goes through German towns, Wiesel describes, “... a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede, dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs.” (Wiesel 100). Here, their almost hopeless desire to eat comes true, but because of the way the food is given, men have to confront each other, emphasizing that animal behavior by the use of the term “stampede.”After they get some of the
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. When the young pipel with the angel looking face was condemned to die this idea grew. As the people were watching the boy about to die they wondered aloud, “[w]here is merciful God, where is He,” and “[w]here He is? This is where...hanging here from these gallows”(Weisel, 64-65). The Jews’ faith and beliefs in justice and a God who has a plan to save them and do right by them evaporized when the young pipel was killed. They thought that if God was really merciful he would have saved the boy. This played a large role in the dehumanization role because by taking away the beliefs of the Jews, which is a big part of their identity, they were reduced to shells of the people they
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
Throughout Elie Wiesel’s Night, his character changes. These changes were in response to his hostile environment. Wiesel was forced to adapt, causing him to lose his identity and his religion.
Wiesel used foreshadowing in the story of Mrs. Schachter by having her yelling about a fire. Of course, no one knew of what she was talking about, so they quieted her. She continues to yell later as well and so the young men gagged her. When they arrived at Auschwitz Mrs. Schachter was screaming about the flames and the fire. When the train stopped, everyone jumped out avoiding the strike of a stick, they thenk smelled the stench of burning flesh from the fire.
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.
Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent
In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors.
The Holocaust was a dreadful and truly awful time period, people were dehumanized, and shamed into losing their faith while they experienced tragic and awful death and pain. One Jewish survivor documents his experiences with death in his memoir, ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel. The novel is filled with his tales of death, dehumanization, and faith throughout the concentration camp, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the Jews lost their innocence that they once had. In the novel, Night, Elie, his father, and his fellow Jews lost their innocence through dehumanization, loss of faith, and experience of death and violence.
How can extreme suffering change a person? Going through a German concentration camp causes many people to have life changing differences in their lives. Elie Wiesel tells his personal experience of going through a concentration camp in his book Night. He shares the horrific events that he, his father, and others had to experience. After going through so much, many people do not have the same mindset as they did before. Being tortured and watching others being tortured changes a person’s life, especially Elie’s, his father’s, Moshe the Beadle’s, and Rabbi Eliahou’s.
“Never shall I forget” (Wiesel Lines 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11 ). Four simple words that say so much, conjuring up feelings of hopelessness and despair. This statement marked the end of Elie Wiesel’s fragile innocence as he spent his first night in Auschwitz. In Lord of the Flies, William Golding deliberately weaved a tale in which Ralph witnessed corruption, signifying the loss of his innocence. Throughout both passages, Golding and Wiesel included the major idea that, once lost, innocence can never be regained.
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.