Eliezer Wiesel is a fourteen-year-old boy living in Sighet, Transylvania, at the start of World War II. He is very devout and wants to study Jewish mysticism. His father, who is a prominent leader of the Jewish community, thinks that he is too young. Nevertheless, Eliezer starts studying the cabbala with Moché the Beadle, a poor and humble man who works in the Hasidic temple. Moché teaches him that he must seek to ask God the right questions even though we will never understand the answers he gives us. Despite ominous signs, the Jews in Sighet refuse to believe that the Fascists could ever do anything to hurt them. Moché is deported along with other non-Hungarians and taken to a concentration camp. He manages to escape and comes back to warn …show more content…
All he has to do is work in a warehouse counting electrical fittings. He meets a Polish violin player named Juliek and also befriends two Czech brothers named Yossi and Tibi. The foreman Franek gets Eliezer's father placed in the same block also. Eliezer is summoned to the dentist to get his gold crown removed, but he feigns illness twice and manages to keep it for awhile. However, Franek beats his Eliezer's father until Eliezer gives the crown to him in exchange for some extra food. One day the Kapo (head of the block) Idek flies into a violent rage and beats Eliezer. A young French girl passing as Aryan comforts him in German. Many years later, Eliezer meets this woman in Paris, and she confesses that she is Jewish and never spoke German in the concentration camp except to …show more content…
He laughs out loud, and Idek punishes him by having him publicly lashed twenty-five times. On a Sunday, an air-raid siren goes off, and the prisoners are locked down. They regain hope that Germany will soon be defeated. Two cauldrons of soup are accidentally left out, and one starving man crawls over to them and dies with his face in the soup. The SS begins having public hangings during roll call. Eliezer is disturbed by the first execution, although the man condemned to death is calm and unafraid. Afterwards, all the prisoners are required to march past his hanging body. The only time that the prisoners weep at a hanging was when a young child, "a sad-eyed angel," is hanged for conspiring to blow up the electric power station. The entire group of prisoners cries, and a man standing behind Eliezer wonders out loud where God
Eliezer later went to other concentration camps in Bakenau and Buna. During these years in the camps he lived through great suffering. Starvation, and survival. He also witnesses thousands of people die and murdered including his own father. Eliezer was finally shipped to Buchenwald. Which would end up being his last stay at any concentration camp. It was now the year 1945 and this ordeal was finally over.
Do not include material from a website, which is a form of plagiarism. As a young boy, Eliezer spent a lot of his time learning about the Zohar, cabbalist books, and the secrets of Jewish mysticism. He meets a man by the name of Moshe the Beadle who acts as his teacher. One day the Jews of Sighet were expelled and sent to Galicia. After a period of time, life eventually became normal again until Moshe the Beadle returns to warn the Jews of their eventual fate.
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
Upon entering the concentration camps, Eliezer and his father demonstrate a normal father and son relationship. In a normal father son relation, the father protects and gives advice to the son, and the son is dependent and reliant on the father. Eliezer and his father demonstrate this relationship to extremes throughout the beginning of their time in the camp. Eliezer reveals his childlike dependency upon entering the camp. Eliezer displays this dependency during first selection by stating, “The baton pointed to the left. I first wanted to see where they would send my father. Were he to have gone to the right, I would have run after him (Night 26-32) ” . Eliezer’s determination to stay with his father was constantly present. Eliezer reflects on a time in the camp which is all that he could think about was not to lose his father in the camp. Eliezer also requires his father’s protection during their stay in the concentration camps. Unintentionally demanding this protection, Eliezer remembers, “I kept walking, my father holding my hand” (Night 29). Eliezer continues to show his need for his father’s presence. Eliezer’s actions and thoughts reflect his
During the marches between camps some of these broken souls would drop to the side of the road where they were shot and killed by a Nazi guard. Eliezer saw others do this, and soon he was thinking of joining
• At the beginning of Night, Eliezer describes himself as someone who believes “profoundly.” How have his experiences at Auschwitz affected that faith?
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lives changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before the German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4).
Truthfully, it was inevitable that Wiesel would find himself connected so deeply to his religious beliefs. “‘By day I studied the Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple’” (Wiesel 3), the boy’s passion for Judaism so prominent at the beginning and
At the beginning of the book, Eliezer was in the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This hierarchy starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and progresses upwards with safety needs, belonging and love, esteem, and finally self-actualization. Eliezer was working with his love and belonging needs with respect to his religion. He was obsessed with the Jewish scripture. He wanted to learn. He was an extremely intellectual teenager. He would study the Jewish scripture with Moche the Beadle. "We would read together, ten times over, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by hear, but to extract the divine essence from it." His views on the divinity of God do not endure through the Holocaust and the concentration camps.
Others weep for the ones lost. They then got prison clothes that were ridiculously fitted. They made exchanges and went to a new barracks in the “gypsies’ camp.” They waited in the mud for a long time. They were permitted to another barracks, with a gypsy in charge of them.
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others. Throughout his recollections, it is clear that Elie has a constant struggle with his belief in God. Prior to Auschwitz, Elie was motivated, even eager, to learn about Jewish mysticism.
This new behavior lead him to develop new character traits. While Ellie was in the concentration camp he became angry at many things, for example “I would have dug my nails into the criminals flesh” (Wisel 39). Elie shows extreme anger when the Nazi officials are beating Elie’s father. Elie was angry because the Nazi soldiers were not treating them nicely and putting them in poor conditions. Elie is usually not a person for anger but he shows this when his family members are being hurt. Elie wants to stand up for what is right and for his family members. Despite his studying, Elie wavered in his belief in Kabbalah while he was at the camp. In the book Elie says, “‘Where are You, my God?’” (66). Elie is wondering why God is not helping the Jews. Elie had complete faith in his religion until now, when he is starting to question his beliefs. He had learned that God will punish evil and save the righteous. However, when Elie saw that God was not helping the Jews situation then asked himself the question, “Is God real?”. Elie became worried because he felt he had lost a companion that always seemed by his side at all times. He lost hope. While Elie was in the camp he had changed the way he acted towards his Dad. Before Elie was sent to the camp Elie had a love hate relationship with his dad. However while they were in the camp together they became closer. Elie showed this when, “I tightened my grip on my
After a brief stay at Auschwitz, they are moved to a new camp, Buna. At Buna, Elie goes through the dehumanizing process of the concentration camps. Both he and his father experience severe beatings at the hand of the kapos. All the prisoners are overworked and undernourished. Many lose faith in God, including Elie. He witnesses several hangings, one of a boy with an angelic face, and sees him struggle for over thirty minutes fighting for his life. To a stranger's cry of "Where is God now?", Elie answers: "He is hanging here on this gallows...." (p. 62). As Elie witnesses the hanging of the young pipel, he feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows. Elie i...