Night By Elie Wiesel Fire Analysis

What begins and has no end, and ends all that which begins? The answer is death. The majority of the time, death is a topic people tend to avoid or deviate from since it triggers uncertainty and fear. During the Holocaust, however, death lingered through the air as thick, black smoke does, suffocating its victims and cruelly seizing their lives. The grim reaper was a daily visitor in the ghettos, transports, and concentration camps in which about six million Jews perished. Death was not only physical for people also suffered moral, emotional, and spiritual death. Countless people lost the faith and values that they had developed throughout their whole lives once they experienced or witnessed the brutality and horrors of the Holocaust. Once

After Wiesel and his father were separated from his mother and sisters in Birkenau, an inmate, in other words, a Jew, confronted them and ruthlessly stated, “Over there. Do you see the chimney over there? Do you see it? And the flames, do you see them? Over there, that’s where they will take you. Over there will be your grave. You still don’t understand? You sons of bitches. Don't you understand anything? You will be burned! Burned to cinder! Turned to ashes!”(31). In other words, a Jew who had been captive in Birkenau, a sector of Auschwitz, attempted to menace Wiesel and his father, who were also Jews, by claiming that they would be sent to the crematory to be burned. Essentially, this quote displays how being in that concentration camp and experiencing the Holocaust first hand caused a Jew to undergo a moral death and turn against his own people. The fact that the inmate referred to Wiesel and his father as “sons of bitches” indicates that he is dehumanizing them. To elaborate, the word bitch literally means a female dog. Therefore, the inmate does not see Wiesel and his father as human beings, but as dogs. One real-world example of how negative changes in one’s life can lead to a moral death such as the inmate’s occurs when some parents find out that their son/daughter is attracted to

After Wiesel, his father, and the other male Jews in there group were given clothes, Wiesel reveals, “ The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded-and devoured-by a black flame” (34). To summarize, Wiesel became a completely different person after only experiencing the beginning of a very long path of suffering. To elaborate, Wiesel was no longer consumed by uncertainty as he had been before he set foot in the concentration camp. What completely consumed him now was the fact that what he had to face every day in that camp was much worse than what he had imagined. This piece of the text can lead the reader to infer that even though it was no longer night and the sun was in the sky, darkness took the place of Wiesel’s soul, which had been destroyed by the flame of hopelessness. There was no trace of the devoted, faithful, and religious kid. Wiesel not only went through an emotional and spiritual death, but he also lost his identity and sense of self. One real-world scenario in which an individual dies spiritually and emotionally and loses the notion of who they are is when a