Weisel's Change in Belief about God through His Camp Experiences
Theology
1) How did Wiesel's belief in God change through his camp experiences?
In the beginning of the book, Wiesel strongly believed in a god. He believed in a god so strongly that he sought out someone to teach him about his god. He also wanted to teach him how to live by the rules of his god. As the book, progressed Wiesel began to lose faith in his god. Wiesel saw many horrific events, which led him to believe that there is no possibility of a god existing because he would never let these things happen to his people. By the end of the novel, Wiesel had lost all faith in God.
5) Wiesel expresses his anger at God many times during the book but especially on page 65. What do you think about this anger? Is it understandable, appropriate or is it irrational or even blasphemous?
I think that Wiesel's anger is completely understandable. If I were enduring such hardships as Wiesel, I might very well become just as angry as he does at the god I believe in. I might even denounce him as Wiesel does. Wiesel has the right to be angry. He feels that he does not deserve to be enduring such hardships. He wants god to help him by stopping the pain and when God does not come to the aid of Wiesel, he denounces him. Emotions probably ran so high and the pain was probably so great that it was very easy to become angry with god.
6) At one point, Wiesel says he does not feel human anymore. What did he mean by this and what things can make a person lose his sense of humanity and dignity?
I think when Wiesel says that he does not feel human anymore he means that he is living like an animal. He is caged like an animal. He works like an animal. He also is stripped of all the things that make him human. He is not aloud to stand up for his rights. He can not speak with his own free will. If he does, he will be killed. This compares to someone who beats his or her dog. If you hit the dog long enough and he will flinch anytime, someone raises a hand to the dog.
“And question of questions: Where was God in all this? It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God.” (Hope, Despair and Memory) This shows how Wiesel couldn’t grasp the reasoning behind God. He wanted
In Wiesel’s case, it was Nazis and in Him’s case, it was the Khmer Rouge. These regimes, in both cases, were making an attempt to overthrow the current government in Germany and Cambodia, respectively. These regimes had a very specific idea about the way a society should be run and governed, and they were willing to do everything in their power to accomplish their own goals and agendas. The Nazi party wanted to “purify” Germany and eliminate any people that they did not see to be desirable. The people that did not fit into their society were forced into concentration camps, where they would be faced with hard labor, inhumane living conditions, and death right around the corner if they did not follow the orders of the Nazi’s in control. Wiesel tells the horrors of these concentration camps, how they changed his life forever. “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 those moments whic...
to the dehumanization of the Jews. He uses descriptive adjectives to shed light on what is truly happening. He also uses irony to help the reader understand the cluelessness of himself and the Jews. Wiesel’s way of writing in the book demonstrates the theme of dehumanization through false
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald writes “He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized”. This idea of how people could become almost unimaginably cruel due to dehumanization corresponds with the Jews experience in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the ruthless massacre of Jewish people, and other people who were consider to be vermin to the predetermined Aryan race in the 1940s. One holocaust survivor and victim was Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Night. Wiesel was one of the countless people to go through the horrors of the concentration camps, which dehumanized people down to their animalistic nature, an echo of their previous selves. Dehumanization worsens over time in Night because of how the Jews treated each other, and how Elie changed physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
It was the end of the war and he no longer has a family after he was relocated and wiesel is basically a walking corpse. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed.” was written in page 91 which clearly states that he no longer believed in God. Now the last piece of evidence to prove that he doesn't care for others anymore would by when his father left the land of the living. On page 112 Wiesel writes how he felt about his passing ‘And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have something like: Free at
Even after he loses his faith, his father proves to be a reason worth living.... ... middle of paper ... ... The other prisoners are getting fed up with his father’s behavior and are beating him, and Wiesel did nothing to stop it.
‘Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done’” (Wiesel 91). The topic of a father and son relationship is extremely personal to Wiesel, which makes him hark back to how he was raised: religiously. Though clouded with a sense of reality from his experience in the camps, Wiesel still has hints of hope in his view of the world from his upbringing in Sighet. Thus, our upbringing affects much of the way we see the
Throughout the speech, Wiesel utilizes a wide range of tones and uses strategic pauses so the audience experiences no difficulties in understanding the struggle he went through. In one of his more intense moments of the speech, he begins talking about how much worse being ignored was, versus being unjustly judged. Religion may be unjust, but it is not indifferent. People cannot live “Outside God” (Wiesel), they need Him even if He is far away.
In the final moments of Night, Elie has been broken down to only the most basic ideas of humanity; survival in it of itself has become the only thing left for him to cling to. After the chain of unfortunate events that led to his newfound solitude after his father’s abrupt death, Elie “thought only to eat. [He] thought not of [his] father, or [his] mother” (113). He was consumed with the ideas of survival, so he repeatedly only expressed his ideas of gluttony rather than taking the time to consider what happened to his family. The stress of survival allocated all of Elie’s energy to that cause alone. Other humanistic feelings like remorse, love, and faith were outcast when they seemed completely unimportant to his now sole goal of survival. The fading of his emotions was not sudden mishap though; he had been worn away with time. Faith was one of the most prominent key elements in Elie’s will to continue, but it faded through constant. During the hanging of a young boy Elie heard a man call to the crowd pleading, “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64). It snapped Elie’s resolve. From this point on, he brought up and questioned his faith on a regular basis. Afterwards, most other traits disappeared like steam after a fire is extinguished. Alone in the wet embers the will to survive kept burning throughout the heart ache. When all else is lost, humans try to survive for no reason other than to survive, and Wiesel did survive. He survived with mental scars that persisted the ten long years of his silence. Even now after his suffering has, Elie continues to constantly repeat the word never throughout his writing. To write his memoir he was forced to reopen the lacerations the strains of survival left inside his brain. He strongly proclaims, “Never shall I forget that night...Never shall I forget the smoke...Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
He became utterly mad, angry towards everything that was going on. He felt as if he had to do something. Wiesel wanted to revolt along with others some of the Men had knives and wanted to attack the armed guards. The older men would just beg their sons to not be
“ Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in his mass graves”(Wiesel 67). Wiesel is telling us in these few sentences exactly how he feels about praying on holidays now. He no longer believes in his religion because the one person he thought he could count on to get them through this horrific time, said and did nothing for them. That is at least what he feels. Other people still believed in their religion and they still prayed on holidays. Wiesel on the other hand completely disregarded everything to do with his religion. He is definitely telling us exactly how he feels in this situation with the way things are looking.” I did not weep.and it pained me that I could not weep”(112). In these sentences Wiesel is telling how he feels about his father dying. He said he could no longer weep. The reason for that is because he was too tired. He showed the rest of the story that he was agt his breaking point when his father died. He didn’t have the feelings any longer. He had nothing to be sad about anymore because he already cried and gave out all of his feelings by helping his father before he
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me never left me” (115). It is important to note what the author tries to get at here. Every time he sees himself, he remembers that he had died. The experiences, the brutality, the inhumanity feel as if he should have been killed. Another example of this is when he first enters Auschwitz. “The beloved objects we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and with them, finally, our illusions.” (29). This quote not only foreshadows a loss of hope and a near end, but the words Wiesel uses in this paragraph really are responsible for its insinuation. He tells readers that, at this point, nothing they had brought with them could keep them from the truth; the truth they were about to
When Wiesel first met Moshe the Beadle, he would chant and sing. He was a poor man who made people feel comfortable around him. “...my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor,were not particularly fond of them. Moshe the Beadle was the exception.”(Wiesel 1) He was deported to polish territory that had been taken over by a secret police group. He escaped back to Sighet after being wounded and taken for dead to tell everyone what happened there. “..... he went from one Jewish house to another,telling the story of Malka, the young girl who had taken three days to die, and of Tobias ….who had begged to be killed before his sons….”(Wiesel 4) Moshe the Beadle desperately tried to warn the Jewish people their fate but they chose to ignore and pity him. “Moshe had changed.There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or of the cabbala ….People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to them.”(Wiesel 4) His exposure to the criminal acts of his oppressors changed his whole personality. All he cared about was protecting the other Jews from experiencing the same things he did.
In his book Night Mr. Elie Wiesel shares his experiences about the camps and how cruel all of the Jews were treated in that period. In fact, he describes how he was beaten and neglected by the SS officers in countless occasions. There are very few instances where decent humans are tossed into certain conditions where they are treated unfairly, and cruel. Mr. Wiesel was a victim of the situation many times while he was in the camps. Yet he did not act out, becoming a brute himself, while others were constantly being transformed into brutes themselves. Mr. Wiesel was beaten so dreadfully horrible, however, for his safety, he decided to not do anything about it. There were many more positions where Mr. Wiesel was abused, malnourished, and easily could have abandoned his father but did not.