“It will be silence, where I am, I don 't know, I 'll never know, in the silence you don 't know, you must go on, I can 't go on, I 'll go on.”
-Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989), The Unnamable
It was always dark in the ghettos where the Jews were kept. Night fell before anyone knew. Winter arrived and no one was told. The bones chilled in the silent darkness of the cold arctic air. The Jews died. Death came as a master from Germany. The men and women, packed like sardines in the gas chambers, spaceless, could not find their own shadows. They had lost their shadows, they had lost their names, their lord, their everything. Shadows were left only to be spoken about and even thirty years after the end of suffering, the echoes, for some, never went
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Celan, writes Cid Corman, “has tasted the ash of language” and his poems are the just the evidence of the conflagration. The reticent is the most spoken in Celan. The white spaces of the page leave the reader as much terrified as the words do. Celan 's relation to the German language is similar to that of Norman Mailer 's Shrimp and the anemone - they destroy one another resulting poems that are, to use a biological analogy, autophagic in nature, for they degenerate into themselves becoming what Derrida calls the "universalizable singularity". We hear the poet 's stammering voice, helplessly screaming aloud to himself while futilely hammering at the gates of the impregnable heinousness of the holocaust in an attempt to ethically hack the language of murder and murderers and purge it off its monstrosity. In With a Variable Key, …show more content…
Critic Jed Re Sula comments, “Very few writers have so openly allowed the language of their poems to be helpless, to be written from a condition of abrupt syntactic disintegration consciously attended to.” Here again, it may be understood that it is the magnum of the sublime that does not obey the rules of grammar and syntax. Only the quantum can be punctuated because it can be properly understood, it can be controlled. The Magnum, the sublime cannot. Celan’s poetry is slammed with stripped-down syntax, telescoped words, neologisms, and multilingual puns which were his attempts to conceptualize the ‘sublime’ phenomena of the holocaust and give it an almost physical shape whose poignant touch can be felt in the tone of
Aristotle wrote, “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light (Aristotle)”. The Holocaust was one of the darkest times humanity has ever seen. A machination brewed by an extraordinarily perverse man that resulted in the deaths of millions, and robbed millions more of their faith and hope. Families were torn apart, towns were destroyed, and humanity lost, all to satisfy one man’s extreme racism and psychotic agenda. If however, one only chooses to focus on the darkness, they might overlook the light, specifically in the two stories of boys who survived against all odds and shared their tales years after defying death.
Long Hours of Darkness “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.... Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live” (32). Never shall we forget the atrocious events that happened to upwards of six million Jews during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a genocide run by Adolf Hitler to exterminate nearly a whole population of Jews and very few prisoners lived to tell their treacherous stories.
The heart wrenching and powerful memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel depicts Elie’s struggle through the holocaust. It shows the challenges and struggles Elie and people like him faced during this mournful time, the dehumanization; being forced out of their homes, their towns and sent to nazi concentration camps, being stripped of their belongings and valuables, being forced to endure and witness the horrific events during one of history’s most ghastly tales. In “Night” Elie does not only endure a physical journey but also a spiritual journey as well, this makes him question his determination, faith and strength. This spiritual journey is a journey of self discovery and is shown through Elie’s struggle with himself and his beliefs, his father
For centuries mankind has faced injustice due to prejudice and hate. How we have dealt with unjust acts has shaped society and molded the way that we think, changing our very morals and values. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, millions of people in concentration camps, including Elie, endure the tyranny of Hitler’s rein in an unforgettable event known as the holocaust. The deplorable conditions and oppressive treatment emphasizes the injustice inflicted upon Elie and his comrades. Wiesel’s theme is to stand up against oppression and speak out against injustice.
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
The characterization of Moshie and Mrs. Shachter shows the indifference and denial of the Jews of Sighet. The chilling juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape containing a camp of death illustrates how the world not only was indifferent to the inhumane suffering, but also continued to shine brightly as if nothing really mattered. This timeless theme of denial and its consequences during the Holocaust echoes the struggles of those in our time who are persecuted solely due to their beliefs. The reader takes away the important lesson of never turning away from those who need it greatest, each time one reads Elie Wiesel’s memoir,
The read experience the painful perspective of young Elie having to survive through immeasurable evil. Both work provide a view of the Holocaust while still resting on the
“Yes, you can lose somebody overnight, yes, your whole life can be turned upside down. Life is short. It can come and go like a feather in the wind. ”- Shania Twain.
In the novel, “Night” Elie Wiesel communicates with the readers his thoughts and experiences during the Holocaust. Wiesel describes his fight for survival and journey questioning god’s justice, wanting an answer to why he would allow all these deaths to occur. His first time subjected into the concentration camp he felt fear, and was warned about the chimneys where the bodies were burned and turned into ashes. Despite being warned by an inmate about Auschwitz he stayed optimistic telling himself a human can’t possibly be that cruel to another human.
The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.
Night is a powerful, first person account of the tragic horrors of the Holocaust written and endured by Elie Wiesel. In this dark literary piece, Wiesel's first hand tale of the atrocities and horrors endured in World War II concentration camps will leave an unforgettable, dark, macabre impression amongst readers that cannot be done with a simple listing of statistics. This tale of human perserverance and the dark side of human nature will cause readers to question their own humanity. Also, it will paint a vivid picture of the vile deeds that mankind is capable of expressing. Reading this book will leave a long lasting impression that is definitely not something that will be soon forgotten.
In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.
Throughout Night, Wiesel depicts a situation in which the Jews were stripped of all emotion, as it transformed into an excess burden that was too strenuous to retain. Despite the fact that the victims of the Holocaust once lived joyous, genuine lives, they were leached of anything worth living for until they became hollowed shells whose only emotion was the lack of any emotion. In the end, the denial of their doom led to their dense apathy which coexisted with a plethora of fragments, which once formed their humanity, that were
Perils of Indifference delivers his message effectively, but not to the same degree of his memoir, for it isn’t able to explore these the horrors of the Holocaust, and use the same extent of literary terms because of its length
It is a common assumption among numerous people in the world that the Holocaust never existed. In fact, almost fifty percent of the world population never even heard of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel helped people around the world learn about the Holocaust through his book “Night.” He wanted people to see the bravery, courage, and guilt of the Jews through his book. “Night” shows the horrific and malicious acts in the German concentration camps during the Holocaust.