One man managed to kill thousands of innocent people. A religious boy survived this mass killing. His name is Elie Wiesel. He lived and now is here to share his memoir “Night”. Elie’s faith went from what he lived for, to what he began to believed was killing him. It is difficult for a person to have strong faith while they are going through something so traumatic. It was beginning to get difficult for Elie to have faith in God. “For God’s sake, where is God?” Elie and many other prisoners began questioning their God. Nobody could believe God was so silent. Elie’s faith began turning into hatred. He thought if God was doing nothing, maybe he was allowing it to happen. “He caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves.”
As a result of living in a concentration camp and the horrible experiences he lived through, it is evident that Wiesel begins to lose the faith that was once so important to him. Although Wiesel himself argues that he did not lose his faith, many would argue that the events that took place during the Holocaust caused Wiesel to resent God and lose his faith that was once so important to him. Growing up, Elie Wiesel’s faith
“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust,” (Wiesel, 1960, p.32). After seeing what was going on at Auschwitz, Elie had began to lose his faith in his God. Certain experiences of hardship and kindness can change their life.
He can't envision that the inhumane imprisonments' inconceivable , remorselessness could conceivably mirror the holiness of god. He thinks about how an amiable God could be a piece of such bad habit and how he could allow such pitilessness to happen. His confidence is just as shaken by the remorselessness and childishness he sees among the detainees. Elie sees that the Holocaust uncovered the childishness, and pitilessness of which everyone including himself is able. On the off chance that the world is so nauseating and unfeeling, he feels, then God either must be appalling and remorseless or should not exist
Nathaniel Hawthorne once said “such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.” As for the novel, Night, you read the struggles of people as they battle within themselves and their faith, we see how they become willing to sacrifice anything to stay alive. In the novel, Night, by Elie Wiesel we grasp further learning about the Holocaust through the author's perspective. We're shown what difficulties the Jews, others have faced, and we see how ruthless they're treated . During his experiences in the concentration camps, Elie Wiesel loses faith in his fellow-man and in God.
Elie soon stopped praying, talking, and studying about God. “ For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to silent. What was there to thank Him for?”
Many Jews who considered themselves staunch believers in G-d, even in the face of tragedy, had their faith tested, and often destroyed, after experiencing the Holocaust. Many could not sustain faith in a G-d who would allow the Jews to suffer such horrific events on such a large and organized scale. The world knows Elie Wiesel, one of the most famous and prolific Holocaust survivors, for his brave and candid writings about the Shoah. His book Night documents his experience in Nazi concentration camps as a teenager during the Holocaust. Before the war begins, Wiesel is a devout Jew who refuses to defy or even question G-d. Throughout the novel, his faith stretches, morphs, and almost disappears.
When everyone in camp was crying and asking where God was as they all watched the boy struggle to cling on to life, Elie had thought to himself that God was there “hanging…from [the] gallows”, symbolizing his loss of faith in God. From then on, as Rosh Hashanah passed, Elie felt intense hatred for God as He did nothing to help the thousands of people suffering and being murdered. Elie refused to sanctify God’s name because of the immense pain He was causing, and felt angry that others in the camp continued to worship Him. Elie felt “terribly alone in a world without God, without man” and “without love or mercy”. As everyone prayed, Elie felt like “an observer [and] a stranger” because he had disconnected from God, and as he defiantly continued to eat instead of fasting for Yom Kippur, Elie “felt a great void opening” inside him as his last bit of trust in God faded.
Elie was not able to preserve his faith in God when he struggled to survive in the concentration camps. He started to question his faith by saying, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why should I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled.” In the midst of so much suffering, Elie finds it hard to bless God.
Of the 9 million people who died during the Holocaust, 6 million were Jewish. Elie Wiesel, a Jew from Transylvania, Romania, is a survivor of the Holocaust. His family was initially forced into a ghetto but were soon transported to Auschwitz, the deadliest concentration camp. Elie was split up from his mother and sister and was only left with his dad. Elie Wiesel’s
At the beginning of Night, Elie was someone who believed fervently in his religion. His experiences at Auschwitz and other camps, such as Birkenau and Buna have affected his faith immensely. Elie started to lose his faith when he and his father arrived at Birkenau. They saw the enormous flames rising from a ditch, with people being thrown in.
“I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God in an improvised prayer for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.” (Wiesel 38). In the Memoir Night by Elie Wiesel he makes it prominent that throughout dire situations you cannot lose your faith or religion.
The Bible states, “The Lord also will be a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble; And those who know your name will put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you.…” [Psalm 9:9-10] Many believe one should turn to God in times of turmoil, but what should one do when death is everywhere and God does not anwser? This is the case in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. In this memoir Wiesel informs the reader of Eliezer’s, the protagonist, life in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
As for me, I had ceased to pray... I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (45). It is apparent here that the effect of the Holocaust on the Jewish people’s faith was delayed on some level. Elie refuses to pray to the God that apparently abandoned him. This is personified when he says he doubts that God has absolute justice.
Religion is something that many people have consistently believed in and turned to in times of need and support. Some of these people rely on their faith more than their own family and friends. Their religion is their entire life and they can’t imagine their lives without it. Imagine a scenario that’s so terrible that God won’t take you out of it. These people will wonder where God is and pray for Him to come.
Continuing on, people judge God 's power to let people die even though they pray to Him. Elie yells at God for his bad judgment for killing innocent people. “...you cause the heavens torain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom you have betrayed, allowing them tobe tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before you!