What Is The Lesson Learned In The Book Night By Elie Wiesel

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night. He has a very specific message in his book that many of us can learn from. Elie Wiesel wrote Night to show that the silence and hesitation surrounding the Holocaust is was what allowed it to occur and continue for as long as it did,

‘Isnt it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back. Everything is different’ Quote by C.S Lewis

Ever since humans came to be, they have done many things to ensure their survival. It’s the reason why we humans have evolved as much as we have. Humans have invented devices, accomplished many challenges, and have even relied on nothing but willpower to survive.

In the book Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his experiences of the Holocaust. Throughout this experience, Elie Wiesel is exposed to life he previously thought unimaginable and they consequently change his life. He becomes

When Elie endured all of this, usually people lose their sanity, but not Elie, for he had his father through most of it. This quote shows that without his father, the only family he had left, he was just an empty shell. “Suddenly, the evidence overwhelmed me: their was no longer any reason to fight.”

The severely cruel conditions of concentration camps had a profound impact on everyone who had the misfortune of experiencing them. For Elie Wiesel, the author of Night and a survivor of Auschwitz, one aspect of himself that was greatly impacted was his view of humanity. During his time before, during, and after the holocaust, Elie changed from being a boy with a relatively average outlook on mankind, to a shadow of a man with no faith in the goodness of society, before regaining confidence in humanity once again later in his life.

In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Eliezer Wiesel narrates the legendary tale of what happened to him and his father during the Holocaust. In the introduction, Wiesel talks about how his village in Seghet was never worried about the war until it was too late. Wiesel’s village received advanced notice of the Germans, but the whole village ignored it. Throughout the entire account, Wiesel has many traits that are key to his survival in the concertation camps. Eliezer’s best traits come out and allow him to survive his terrible ordeal, which are adaptability, determination, patience, and perseverance. Elie uses his father as his reason to persevere and keep on going through.

Dehumanization is the process in which a person is deprived of their human qualities. The Nazis often used this practice on the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust as these people were stripped of their humanity, and many examples of this can be found in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even with these crematories…”(Wiesel 15). This quote showcases the absence of humanity in concentration camps. The Nazis valued the lives of the Jews so little that they threw the Jews into fires and gas chambers without any regard that those were human lives. The prisoners were denied of their basic human right, life. They were no longer humans, but instead they were corpses. While some Jews’ lives were immediately taken by the Nazis at the entrance to the camps, the ones who stayed alive were who suffered

Empathy; the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. An admirable trait, it often coincides with one's resilience. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his experiences as a young man during the Holocaust. It is a journey of suffering and survival, where the true devastation of the Holocaust is brought to light. Elies great empathy for his father shaped his resilience which allowed him to survive.

Imagine knowing your fate ahead of time. That single moment would be stuck in your head, replayed every second to prevent it. This would obstruct your feeling of morals, making you only focus on your own survival. Nothing would get in your way of trying to survive. During the Holocaust, many people were faced with this moment when they stepped in a concentration camp. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, describes the horrors of focusing on your own survival. Certain acts provoke inhumane acts throughout the ordeal. A central theme in Night is, even though it’s difficult, people should value compassion over their own survival.

During all of the struggles Elie gains a bit of life knowledge, and learns more emotions about himself. If this journey never happened Elie would still be focussing about his studies and not about his family. A fact Elie acquires during the holocaust is always to stay positive in hard times. An example of this is when Elie is running for miles and notices men giving up just makes Elie think about when he can sleep and eat at the next camp. When news comes that the Russians will save the prisoners, Elie keeps this as a positive and keeps thinking this horrifying journey will be over. Elie also impacts himself by being scared of letting go of his father, and by feeling this way it makes Elie stronger and pushes his father forward. Even though Elie’s father died, Elie still continued on with his hope of reaching the end of the awful journey. Strong is a word to Elie inherited because he kept believing in living even though he had nothing to live

Elie shows tremendous mental strength despite having an extreme lack of physical strength throughout the story. In the following quote, Elie and his family had just arrived at Birkenau and is immediately separated from his mother and sister. “Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone” (29). Imagine being a young 15 year old boy barely fed, dehydrated and at a camp that was created for the purpose of killing thousands of people and immediately once you arrive losing your mother and sister. Elie shows extreme mental strength during this event, rather than trying to stop it from happening

In chapter one of Night by Elie Wiesel, the some of the characters of the story are introduced and the conflict begins. The main character is the author because this is an autobiographical novel. Eliezer was a Jew during Hitler’s reign in which Jews were persecuted. The book starts out with the author describing his faith. He is Jewish, but he wants to go deeper into his religion and learn more about it. He becomes good friends with a man named Moishe the Beadle. Moishe is very knowledgeable about the religion and he teaches Eliezer a lot.

“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. At times, it appears unviable for one’s life to transform overnight in just a few hours. However, this is something various individuals experienced in soul and flesh as they were impinged by those atrocious memoirs of the Holocaust. In addition, the symbolism portrayed throughout the novel Night, written by Elie Wiesel, presents an effective fathoming of the feelings and thoughts of what it’s like to undergo such an unethical circumstance. For instance, nighttime plays a symbolic figure throughout the progression of the story as its used to symbolize death, darkness of the soul,

The Holocaust will always be one of the most horrific memories that will never be suppressed. The Holocaust was when millions of Jews were thrown into concentration camps and tortured until their death. Families were being split up, not knowing they would never see each other again. It was so tragic, that the Jews eventually did not mind the deceased bodies lying beside them on the ground. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. It just so happens that Elie Wiesel was one of the strongest survivors. So, what was Wiesel trying to prove? Well, he insisted on sharing what he went through and explained the vast loss of faith he suffered from due to the concentration camps. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses characterization, imagery, and tone to show the emotion and detail of his experience in such a tragic event.