Loss of Faith in Elie Wiesel's "Night" Night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout the book the author Elie Wiesel, as well as many prisoners, lost their faith in God. There are many examples in the beginning of Night where people are trying to keep and strengthen their faith but there are many more examples of people rebelling against God and forgetting their religion. The first example of Elie loosing his faith is when he arrived at Auschwitz. Elie and his father are directed to go to the left. A prisoner then informs them that they are on their way to the crematory. Elie's father recites the Kaddish or prayer for the dead. Revolt rises up inside of Elie and he questions God. Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for? (Wiesel 31) Another example of prisoners in the concentration camp loosing their faith in Night is when the pipel, a young child, was hung in front of the whole camp. The pipel was the Oberkapo?s servant. The Oberkapo was the leader of the fifty-second unit. He never struck or insulted the prisoners who worked under him ,that is why the prisoners loved him . Even though most pipels were cruel and hated, this one had the face of a sad angel and was loved by all. The Oberkapo was suspected in the intentional explosion of Buna?s electric power station. He...
Humans morals are challenged when forced to endure great suffering and torment. During the Holocaust, some inmates broke under great distress and their morals went wrong. Other inmates not only had to worry about the Germans, but also the people who lost all morality and turned into brutal savages. In the memoir Night by elie Wiesel, humans can’t maintain a moral mentality when under great suffering as portrayed through Elie and fellow inmates.
Night. A novel was written by Elie Wiesel, who reveals his experience as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust. The Nazis captured people that are not of Aryan race and put them in concentration camps, where they suffer extreme torture, abuse, and dehumanizing treatments. These treatments caused physical and psychological changes on these innocent prisoners. The Prisoners in Night had to undergo harsh treatments that left them acting and thinking like animals. Dehumanization. The story begins with Eliezer, a young Jewish boy, describing his life in a concentration camp. The Jews are forced to abandon all their possessions, separate from their families and lose their freedom. The Jews survive
Elie Wiesel begins to lose his faith in God after he witnesses several horrific events. After only the first day in camp, Elie remembers everything he has seen such as the fire and smoke, as well as dead bod...
Elie seems to lose faith in God. “"Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba…May His name be celebrated and sanctified…" whispered my father. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (33) The God Elie once prayed and cried out to before was allowing his people to die in horrible ways. God, a being who is supposed to be loving and merciful was allowing them to die alongside millions of other
Formerly, the idea of giving up faith would have seemed surreal when Elie was a strong believer in God. Nevertheless, after enduring all of the trepidation, dismay and shock through his voyage in the death camps, Elie truly does become angry with God and doubt His existence when the terrors of this nightmare come to a halt and he is freed at last.
In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is an extremely passionate and devout Jew, but as the story progresses, Elie sees horrendous things in the concentration camps, and as a result, he slowly loses his faith. Elie displays his extreme devotion in the beginning stages of the memoir when he states, “By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple. I cried because something inside me felt the need to cry” (Wiesel 4). Elie is clearly very fond of learning more about his religion and connecting to God in a spiritual way. Furthermore, Elie is only thirteen years old, so when he says he cries because he feels the need to cry, he is exhibiting incredible passion. Elie reveals signs of change and begins to lose his faith in God just a few moments after arriving at the concentration camp when he says, “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). Elie exclaims that he cannot worship God anymore due to the awful things he has seen at Auschwitz. He does not want to believe in the being that could have allowed these awful events to happen. This is a completely different Elie from the loving and caring Elie in the ghetto. Elie also uses rep...
Elie Wiesel wrote Night as a memoir of the horrors he endeavored during his teen years in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. He begins his novel by describing Moishe the Beadle, who later becomes his mentor in all things Kabbalah. “Why did I pray? Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (Wiesel 4) For a child of thirteen, he was deeply fascinated and devout towards the religion, listening for hours on end to Moishe’s lectures. He believes His God to be benevolent, that without His ubiquitous God, nothing would exist. After Moishe is sent away and experienced what the...
Religious faith is normally lost when you rely on god for almost everything. As a result, Elie and his father no longer believe. “And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside of me, a prayer to this god I no longer believed in (Wiesel 91).” Elie didn’t believe in a god anymore, so he then had lost hope in his religion. “My whole desire to live became concentrated in my nails (Wiesel 94).” Elie used to strongly believe in this kind of god, but because of what went on in the world around him, he no longer believes. God is someone who
Eliezer loses hope, trust, and his beliefs. He begins to rely on himself because he knew that only he can help himself and he could not depend on anyone else. "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever..."(pg 32). Elie's father was struck, and that was when he realized he was afraid of death, and he felt guilty because he did not help his father.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
Tragedy can be a leading contributor to one's loss of faith. For example Elie Wiesel addresses his loss of faith in the Memoir "Night" where the memoir covers his journey through the crimes committed against him and his family during World War II. Elie Wiesel and his family are pulled through extreme tragedy as the
The first example of Elie losing faith was when he questioned God about all of the horrible things happening at the concentration camps. The quote: “Blessed be God’s name? Why would I bless him?”(67) When he had seen how people were being killed and treated, he then would think about the reason for these types of tragedies to be allowed in the world. Elie never knew that there
Imagine witnessing infants getting tossed in the air and getting used as targets for the soldiers to shoot at. Imagine being constantly beaten and ordered around every day. Many jews experienced this and lived with the conditions. The holocaust was a deliberate killing of the Jews. Elie Wiesel was one of those people witnessing the infants getting tossed in the air and being constantly beaten down by German soldiers. He witnessed hundreds of people dying if it was from getting shot, burned, the gas chamber, etc. Elie explains his experience in many different forms, for example, he wrote a book called “Night” sharing his point of view.
Evidently, Wiesel uses silence to demonstrate how he lost faith in his God. For instance, Wiesel felt anger rising within him, which was very foreign to him. Why should Wiesel uplift His name? The Lord almighty, long and terrible Master of the Universe, made a decision to become silent. What was the reason for why he should be thankful for Him? (Wiesel 33). To explain, Wiesel was beginning to feel angry at his God, and he was shocked to find his God nowhere to help. After devoting himself to his religion, he becomes increasingly more frustrated each time his religions fails to save him. Consequently, Wiesel comes to a conclusion that his faith may have been a minor myth, and therefore accommodates his overall character as well. Unquestionably, if he had based his morals off of what God said, what is right and what is wrong, how could one
Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel came face-to-face with many obstacles in which he considers giving up on himself, his father, and God. This put a strain on his relationship with God due to the fact that Wiesel blamed most sins committed within the novel on God. While revealing his personal experience during the Holocaust in the novel, Night, Wiesel puts a strain on his relationship with God and uses theology to describe the importance of faith in someone’s life.