Daniel Haugen Mr. Dayton Ninth Lit/Comp 19 October 2014 Starvation in Concentration Camps Eliezer Wiesel’s Night is a memoir about his own personal tragic experience with the Holocaust Concentration Camps. While there Eliezer’s entire life turns upside down as he is exposed to the worst forms of torture that anyone should be involved with. Night greatly demonstrates the evils that were bestowed upon the Jewish community and the other groups thought by Hitler to be intolerable. The Concentration Camps caused the Jewish people to be deprived of the proper nutrition leaving them not only physically scarred, but psychologically as well. One of the most known facts about the camps is that the prisoners were not treated fairly; truly they were dealt …show more content…
Only a four word sentence and still it has more meaning than almost all the rest of the sentences. The prisoners knew how important food really was since they were forced to live without very much of it. Eliezer states: “Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time,” (52). Just take some time to think about that. They had become literal skeletons of their past selves stuck in a horrid world. Eliezer explains the food situation as the bread being the crust of the real thing and the soup being almost just hot water with some taste to it. The starvation caused physical scarring to the body. Also there was psychological scarring to the spirit within their body. Their thoughts only consisting of: when the next “meal” would be …show more content…
In only around a year Eliezer had already lost everything: his whole family, all possessions, his humanity, and his faith in God. Eliezer writes after release “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That’s all we cared about. No though of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread,” (115). No revenge, only bread. They were starved to that point. He even added: “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. 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,” (115). The memory will haunt him for however long he will live. That’s something he will just have to live
(pg. 113) For them, food was equivalent to freedom. They fought aggressively like animals for a crumb of bread. It was unfair that prisoners were given a bit of soup or a slice of bread and shot at for being outside on sight .
Eliezer and his father got separated from his mother and younger sisters. For months in the concentration camps, Eliezer witnessed inhumane doings that scarred him for the rest of his life. He was forced to work at Buna, a factory, and run on a daily basis to keep himself alive. He became malnourished because of the unappetizing food that they served. He and other Jews were punished and beaten for no reason.
In the preface of “Night” a book and memoir about the holocaust, by Elie Wiesel, he writes that he doesn’t know or no longer knows what he meant to achieve by writing the memoir. Earlier in the preface we are informed that the reason he began writing “night” was because he believed that he left the camps alive by chance, and that he didn’t deserve it more than anybody else thrown into German concentration camps. After realizing this he didn’t want to waste what he had and because of that he immediately set pen to paper and began writing a book that would bring its writer the nobel peace prize. But what did he achieve in this book?
The memoir Night captures the horrors of Elie Wiesel, a Jewish Holocaust survivor. In this beautifully crafted, riveting, and unforgettable book, the true meaning behind inhumanity becomes clear as Elie and his father are in a extremely cruel journey. The book depicts how awful conditions were and how they had to adapt to their environment to even have the slightest chance of survival. In the WWII era (1941-1945) times were difficult and most places involved with WWII were put in a state of economic depression, even more so in certain parts close to axis powers.
The book, “Night”, by Elie Wiesel is a first-hand account that traces his life before and during the holocaust and in the concentrations camps. There were many experiences that Wiesel faced that impacted him as a person. Wiesel coped with these experiences and his new life in Auschwitz by pretending as if he wasn’t there and by not caring about anyone else. Out of the many experiences Wiesel faced in the book, there were three main ones that stood out to me.
However, the horrors of the concentration camp makes Eliezer and his father begin to value their relationship. As the story progresses, Elie has one thought—not to lose his father. In the camp, Eliezer and his father have stuck together and stayed by each other for most of the story. This is in contrast to their relationship before their imprisonment.
“What if your life was just taken away?” Well in the memoir “ Night” by Elie Wiesel published in 1956. This memoir is about a Jewish kid, Eliezer, who is taken by the Nazi with his family. He witnesses the death of his family and others. Now is taken to this journey to survival.
The book Night is an autobiography by Elie Wiesel, in which he describes his experiences living in Hitler’s Europe and surviving the Holocaust with his father. Elie is a Romanian Jew who grows up in Sighet, Hungary, around the time when Adolf Hitler begins cracking down upon Jews and other “undesirables”. He, along with his family and neighbors, is taken to a ghetto and then shortly after to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wiesel and his father manage to pass the selection, and are subsequently transferred to Buna, Gleiwitz, and finally Buchenwald. Due to the trauma Elie experiences at the hands of the Nazis, he undergoes a profound transformation, losing faith, empathy, and humanity.
The book Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiographical account of Wiesel's experience in the concentration camps of the Nazi Holocaust. In the book, the author was a young jewish teenager who lived in Sighet, Transylvania when Hitler began his Final Solution. Wiesel then explained the rapid deterioration of the Jewish lifestyle through accounts of how his family was pushed out of their homes and into Jewish ghettos. He continued to decr being loaded onto a train sent to Auschwitz where half of his family members would die. Throughout the rest of the book, Wiesel struggled with many internal and external conflicts inside the camps, until he was liberated after nine months later.
From Devotion to Doubt As a young adolescent, Eliezer Wiesel is taken to a place where he is beaten, spit on, and treated like nothing more than an object. In his memoir, Night, Eliezer takes readers on a journey through the horrors of being a young Jew in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. These camps are so awful that public hangings and burning people alive are normal occurrences. Witnessing and experiencing these horrific events causes Eliezer’s previously unshakable faith in God to waver.
I feel like the book “night” is similar to the other books I have read about the holocaust. So far, the mood is very depressing in the book it’s constantly talking about death and everyone in the camp sound very depressed. I mean, I would be too if I was in a concentration camp but I think the author is over exaggerating it and focussing on that mood too much. The feelings the character Elie has are hopeful like he expects something to suddenly happen and he's free.
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.
He was running next to me, out of breath, out of strength, desperate. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.” Eliezer finds the strength to keep going because of his
One day Eliezer comes to his father’s bed and he is gone most likely taken to the crematory. He doesn't mourn for him and feels bad because of it, but he also feels
This excerpt is relevant to Wiesel’s biggest fear which is that the world has not learned or has simply forgotten about the Holocaust. The line “Never shall I forget…” (Wiesel, 34) is reiterated to show how important remembering is to Wiesel. This also pertains to Wiesel 's “big idea” which is that his purpose for writing Night was to never let anyone forget about the Holocaust. He hopes that this memoir helps prevent another genocide like this, and helps motivate people to stand up to injustices.