Loss Of Identity In Night By Elie Wiesel

Night is a memoir of a Jewish boy who lives to see the horrors during the Holocaust. He tells an emotional tale of his scarring experiences at multiple concentration camps. He begins with his family in his hometown of Sighet, where they are forced into supervised ghettos. The authorities then begin shipping the Jews into concentration camps, in which he is separated from his mother and sister. He and his dad are then forced to Auschwitz, where they begin their series of struggles. As the story unfolds, it becomes a prominent theme that difficult situations bring a loss a faith, identity, and character.
Eliezer is faced with many strenuous obstacles, and it reveals the truth in his faith. The narrator hears a man yell out, “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here he is-- He is hanging here on this gallows…’ That night

Eliezer paints an image while he is leaving his hometown, “Household treasures, valuable carpets, silver candelabra, prayer books, bibles and other religious articles littered the dusty ground beneath a wonderfully blue sky; pathetic objects which looked as though they had never belonged to anyone” (Wiesel 25). All these objects that once gave people a sense of identity, were just simply abandoned in the middle of the street as if they had absolutely no value. The Jews who owned all those items were forced to leave everything behind, which made them lose their sense of identity. Later in the story, Eliezer explains the vivid moment in which, “The three “Veterans,” with needles in their hands, engraved a number on our left arms. I became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (Wiesel 51). The Jews no longer had their name that was given to them at birth, but were given numbers that had no sense of personality or own identity to them. They were no longer people with souls and stories, but just objects with different