“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” There he stands looking at himself in the mirror, unrecognisable after 1 year in Nazi concentration camps. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel horror takes on a whole new meaning, when a 15 year old Elie Wiesel is sent to Auschwitz, separated from his mother and sisters, and put through unimaginable horrors in the form of Nazi concentration camps. He is psychologically beaten and thrown down a horrible path. This book is an example of what happens when you lose your faith in god, lose all emotionality, and lose yourself.
By the end of the book “Night” Elie has slowly, but surely, lost his faith. Going from a student studying the jewish faith with hopes of being a rabbi, to an atheist is a pretty huge change. On page Elie asks “ Where is gods mercy? Where’s god? How can I believe, how can anybody believe in this god of mercy”. All of the atrocities he has witnessed and went through lead
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The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” He is looking at himself, a corpse from Auschwitz who let his father die without shedding a single tear, his whole family either dead or very closely escaping its grasp. This is not Elie, this is what Auschwitz has made of him, the product of torture, starvation, and psychological battering. He is scared of his own reflection. On page 112 shortly after the death of his father Elie reveals, “...deep inside me… I might have found something like: Free at last!...”. His own father dies and he feels free, freed of his burden. Being in Auschwitz was like being in a trance, while at the camps he became something he wasn’t, and after being freed he has time to reflect on himself. As you can imagine Elie is horrified of what he sees, a dead, lifeless corpse staring at him.
Elie’s experiences within Auschwitz turned him into his own fear. Elie feared many different parts of his experiences at the concentration camp, but the fear of mistreating the only thing he had left in life, his father, was something that left Elie truly broken. The examples used previously demonstrate that Auschwitz did more than just make Elie see a son kill his own father for bread, it did more than just make Elie see people abandon each other (e.g. when Meir abandoned his father), it did more than just make Elie want to never find his father again, it did more than just make Elie see his own father die, and it did more than just make Elie selfish and cruel (e.i. when Elie grudgingly shared his meal with his dying father); his experiences
In the beginning of the book Night Elie describes himself as someone who believes profoundly. One way that Auschwitz and/or other campers have affected this by, putting him down, watching innocent people die by getting either shot or hanged in front of his little eyes. In the first chapter of Night the quote, “Why did I pray? Strange question.
During the book, Elie becomes numb to the horror around him and becomes a different person. From the first time he stepped into a concentration camp he saw terrible things, like children being thrown into pits. He saw many people be killed by officers or by other causes. The
In the text, Elie talks about what things he will never forget about his first night in camp and he states “Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever….Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” (Wiesel 34) this shows how on the first night in Auschwitz that he starts to question why his god would let something like this happen and he starts to lose faith that his life will get better. While Elie was in the Buna camp he and the other prisoners were forced to watch the
The second “kiss” from God Elie received was in the Rabbi’s words. When his life began to progressively become worse in the camps moments like the ones in the ghettos were not common; he began to become more despair. The book Night states, “He was the only rabbi whom nobody ever failed to address as "Rabbi" in Buna. He looked like one of those prophets of old, always in the midst of his people when they needed to be consoled. And, strangely, his words never provoked anyone.
Night Elie loses his faith throughout the book, but it was not always like that. Elie used to be very religious and wanted to learn as much as possible about his faith. “One evening, I told him how unhappy I was not to be able to find in sighet to teach me the Zohar, the Kabbalistic works, the secret of jewish mysticism” (Wiesel 5). Elie said to Moshe the Beadle. His father wasn’t supportive of his decision so he took things into his own hands.
During the Holocaust, food played a significant part. It was important for the way people took care of themselves and survived. The reason being was that in the concentration camps it was every man for himself and they sought food to stay healthy. Elie Wiesel had managed to keep himself strong and healthy for his father.
All throughout the book Elie had shown signs of distress when he was threatened with losing his father. A great example of this was when they had to run past the SS doctors and Dr. Mengele as fast as they could, because they believed if they got their right arms number written down it would be certain death. Elie went first and waited for his father for what seemed like eternity and finally he saw his father heading towards him. Then they immediately asked each other, "Did you pass? Yes.
The author of Night, Elie Wiesel wrote his novel to inform his readers of the gruesome experiences that he witnessed during the Holocaust. Throughout his novel, Wiesel reenacted many different events that took place to illustrate the main themes of this novel and exhibit his emotions. During the course of the novel, the reader is witnessing Elie's personal experiences in the Holocaust, seeing not only what he had to go through, but how he had felt while it was taking place. In Night, Elie Wiesel includes the struggle between a father and his son. While Elie spent his life in the concentration camps, he not only had to ensure his own safety, but his father’s too.
At the start, Elie was young, free, and innocent of anything. He did nothing wrong and just lived his life through Judaism. This changed quickly as he began spending his days in Auschwitz. Each day he grew more and more cold and empty. He lost family, religion, hope, or any self pride he had.
At the end of the book, Elie survives but lost many loved ones, including his father, and constantly mentions how he is "unworthy" to be alive, and how he feels like he doesn't deserve to live. Elie made this book to share his story as someone who had actually experienced the holocaust and has it as a core memory. “My father no longer felt the club’s blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father.
Elie started to change after finally arriving in Auschwitz. After being checked by Dr. Mengele, he and his dad started to walk toward the crematoria and saw, “children thrown into flames (32).” This opened up Elie’s eyes to the world that while he was living in peace, a whole lot of death was going on. It had made him question about his faith in God, “For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name?
During the holocaust Elie had to overcome a whole lot of things and mature quickly to survive. Then he had to think of things to keep him going; “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” Thoughts to keep his head still staying up and to not to be quiver, but to be strong, independent, emotionless. He was trying to stay strong to stay alive and keep going on.
God’s perceived silence during a time of desperate need can lead to the lost of faith or doubt within oneself. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the narrator struggles to maintain his faith and his identity he witnesses the dehumanizing acts being inflicted upon him and many other Jews. As he experience more and more atrocities in the camps, Elie begins to rebel against his religious upbringing. Elie survives the Holocaust through a battle of conscience: first believing wholeheartedly in God, then resisting that faith, and finally reclaiming that faith.
Elie was held captive in concentration camps from 1944-1945. During his time in the concentration camps, he became grateful for what he had, overcame countless obstacles, and more importantly kept fighting until he was free. [The Holocaust is very important to learn about because it can teach you some important life lessons.] You should always be grateful for what you have, no matter what the circumstances are. This lesson can be learned when Elie says, “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me any more”(109).