Identity In Elie Wiesel's Loss Of Identity

Night is a memoir by Elie Weisel about his life and experiences during the Holocaust. The book starts by describing Elie and his family 's everyday life before laws that restricted the rights of Jews are created and they were moved to ghettos. Elie stayed in Auschwitz, then moved to Buchenwald. He lived in concentration camps from 1944, until April of 1945 when the Buchenwald was liberated. Throughout his experiences, and the memoir, Elie’s view of God changed and affected his identity.

Ever since humans came to be, they have done many things to ensure their survival. It’s the reason why we humans have evolved as much as we have. Humans have invented devices, accomplished many challenges, and have even relied on nothing but willpower to survive.

From then on, I had no other name” (42).This shows the dehumanization of Elie because now he is referred to a number rather than himself. No one now will ever know him by name Eliezer but for a number for the next couple of years he spends in the concentration camps.

The decisions made by Elie Wiesel in the book Night both positively and negatively impacted his life. These were decisions that the author thought were best for him or for his mother, sister and father. However, the particular decisions made by the boy in Night affected his identity, innocence, and significantly changed his view of life during his experience in the holocaust.

Empathy; the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. An admirable trait, it often coincides with one's resilience. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. It is a journey of suffering and survival, where the true devastation of the Holocaust is brought to light. Elies great empathy for his father shaped his resilience which allowed him to survive.

For most people, you have a feeling or need to help others. When someone is bleeding or hurt you wouldn’t just leave them. Caring for others and being compassionate comes naturally to most. Despite how most people would react it’s not what Elie had witnessed. Forced out of the Ghettos, thrown into a train full of people where you couldn’t move or sit. “‘There are eighty of you in this car,’ the German officer added. ‘ If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs.’” They were over packed in the cart. Treated as if they weren’t people and told if they tried to escape they’d be killed. Not only did they threaten to kill them but they compared to an animal, showing what the Nazis actually thought about them.

Throughout this novella, the denied ability to have an exclusive title other than just a number, the critical circumstances of the feared concentration camp Auschwitz, and the disability to obtain a soul, all contribute to Elie’s incredulity towards his faith. Family titles and names are a prodigious gift from God. To acquire a name means that there is an importance for the individual’s life. Without names, an individual has no meaning and no worth. The SS men have replaced their captives original names for irrelevant numbers as shown in the following quote, “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (Wiesel 42). This quotation explains the intended impact the SS men desired for the Jewish prisoners to believe. The artificial belief the SS men implanted into the minds of all their prisoners is that they are insignificant and unworthy of a name. This deteriorates an individual's emotional well being and will to live which leads to an unjustified faith. Elie’s identity has been reshaped by the sensation of feeling meaningless because his name is accustomed around his personality which defines one’s identity. Thus without a name, Eliezer has no individual personality or identity. Auschwitz is eminent for their impeccable lifestyle and cold-blooded soldiers. The barbarous SS men are domineering towards the Jewish captives throughout their eerie threats and actions, as demonstrated in the following quotation, “From time to time, a shot exploded in the darkness. They had orders to shoot anyone who could not sustain the pace. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of the pleasure. If one of us stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog.” (Wiesel 85). This quote justifies the heartless actions of the SS men. While testing the emaciated prisoner’s endurance, without hesitation, the SS men proceeded to executing any Jewish hostage who dares to refuse

Night by Elie Wiesel is a book about what Elie witnessed in the concentration camps during the holocaust in WWII and what he had to go through. The film, Hotel Rwanda, featured a similar story except it was about the Rwandan genocide. The reason why both Night and Hotel Rwanda seem similar because they both have ethnic groups that are being hunted down through means of genocide, there are people who are trying to protect the ethnic groups being hunted, and both of the situations that happen in these two stories challenge the morals of the characters.

One reoccurring theme that is present in the Holocaust is a change of identity with everyone involved. The incidents people confronted, especially the Jews, during this harsh time was life changing and traumatic. The identity of many in the concentration camps changed; young and innocent children developed into mature men. Elie Wiesel in the novella, Night, faces a change of identity within himself and the surrounding people, the Jews, through a variety of events that he encounters.

Themes in a story help to describe what the book is about. It does this in the book Night by helping describe what World War 2 was like for the Jews. It also helps to see what the people in the camps went through. My two themes from night are imprisonment and survival. The first one I will talk about is imprisonment, then i’ll talk about survival.

“Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.” This was written by Elie Wiesel. He published a book describing life during World War 2. During the holocaust, Elie is a young boy who is taken to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.Throughout NIght, the main character, Elie experienced horrible events causing his loss of faith, emotional changes, and desire of death.

I personally believe that Elie Wiesel is inaccurate with his claim. He states that “Remembering the Holocaust will help ensure that this type of atrocity does not occur in the future”. I strongly disagree with Elie’s claim because even if people understand this dramatic event, there is always going to be evil in the world and not everyone is going to care about the devastation of these events. Some people will wreck havoc among us, and we can’t stop it with an explanation of what happened last time. We as people need to stop obsessing over the past, and look into our futures, and how we will make the world a better place throughout the future.

Upon Elie’s arrival at Auschwitz he was punctured with tattoo, immediately being reduced to a number. “I quickly became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (31). Using symbolism to indicate the inhumanity of the concentration camps, Elie demonstrates just how apparent and instantaneous it was to lose a sense of identity. Using the word “quickly” proved that dehumanization was not a lengthy or lingering process, the goal was to break them then and there. Elie was not just a number, he “became” a number and was only referred to as that, not a human being. “I felt the sweat run down my back.” “A-7713!” “I came forward” (42). The process of tattooing your identification on is degrading. The sensation and pain of being called a number is far more demeaning. The fact that S.S. officers could discount the essential human quality that we all possess -names- and replace it with something so cold and impersonal such as an identification number made the dehumanization process simple. What were people without names? In the Nazis minds they were superficial beings, without names in a camp, therefore they deserved any barbaric treatment thrown their way. To Hitler, the fact that Jews could potentially be broken this promptly proved he was in a step into the right direction at dehumanizing and eliminating the Jewish

Many people have heard of the Holocaust but have never thought about how it affected an individual who went through it. The Holocaust is the most well-known genocide, although there are many other instances of mass killings, including the Bosnian Genocide. Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, targeted both Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians for wicked crimes resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people (80 percent Bosniak) by 1995. It was the worst act of genocide since the Nazi regime’s destruction of 6 million European Jews during World War II. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel reveals the negative impact the Holocaust had on his identity. Likewise, Hasan Hasanović is a survivor of the

As the original SS Officer that brought Elie here along with many others and telling them that they'd be burn if they didn't heed rule, Elie had tried to convince his father that the officers wouldn't dare for it would violate against humanity. In return, most grimly, his father replies "Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories." (Wiesel, 21), denying that they, along with the rest of the Jews, were even human. With further inhumanity with objectifying the Hews entirely, the prisoners move to a new camp called Auschwitz, where they are labeled with numbers and letter, with Elie to himself: "I became A-7713. After that I had no other name." (Wiesel, 28). Afterward, being commanded to go to their own blocks, Elie's father ahd gone to ask where the location was politely, in return receiving a stare "as if he wanted to convince himself that this man was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly." (Wiesel, 26) which further recognizes the theme of inhumanity of