During the Holocaust, the meaning of the word “war” varied drastically from person to person. For some people, it was just another article in the newspaper. But to others, it meant being shipped off to a labor camp or never seeing their loved ones ever again. The book Night describes the life of Elie Wiesel and his experiences during the Holocaust and how the word “war” changes throughout his life.
In the beginning of the book, war was this distant event that no one wanted to think about. The Jews that weren’t yet affected by the Nazis tried to ignore the fact that other Jewish people were being slaughtered and that their time was soon to come. They hoped that they wouldn’t be affected if they didn’t talk about it. “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” The unaffected jews tried to look away from the terrible things Hitler was doing to their religion and culture.
Further into the book, war became the main priority in the lives of the Jewish and they started to acknowledge what Hitler was trying to achieve. Elie was now directly impacted by the war and the horrors that came along with it. “What do you expect? That’s war… The deportees were
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People had gotten used to it and began to accept it as their daily life until Hitler was taken down. They had forgotten what it was like to truly be free. “As for us, chances were that we would be allowed to go on with our miserable little lives until the end of the war.” The Jews who survived the camps would possibly be able to return to their homes, but they would still be hated by their neighbors and the Germans around them. The majority of survivors of Hitler’s “Final Solution” ended up in large camps until housing could be established, but this time they were