The ground is frozen, parents sob over their children, stomachs growl, stiff bodies huddle together to stay slightly warm. This was a recurrent scene during World War II. Night is a literary memoir of Elie Wiesel’s tenure in the Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel created a character reminiscent of himself with Eliezer. Eliezer experienced cruelty, stress, fear, and inhumanity at a very young age, fifteen. Through this, he struggled to maintain his Jewish faith, survive with his father, and endure the hardships placed on his body and mind. 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. When Eliezer and his father, Chlomo, arrived at their first concentration camp, Eliezer was in an emotional agony. He considers running to the electrical wire to escape the "slow agony in the flames." His father replies by weeping and reciting the prayer of the dead. "May His Name be blessed and magnified" This tests Eliezer’s faith for the first time. "Why should I bless His name...what had I to thank Him for," he said... ... middle of paper ... ...take away the freedom of thought. It will stay with us until the end of time. Viktor E. Frankl illustrated this in his essay “An Inner Freedom” from the book Man’s Search for Meaning. He stated, “The sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision and not the result of amp influences alone.” Night by Elie Wiesel is a very sad book. The struggle that Eliezer endured is similar to one that we all face. Eliezer’s was during the holocaust. Ours can be during any period of life. If we set our priorities in our hearts, nothing can change them except ourselves. Night is a prime example of this inner struggle and the backwards progress that is possible with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It teaches that the mind truly is “over all.” As Frankl wrote, “Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate,” no matter what the circumstance.
When asked by Moshe the Beadle the reason why he prayed, Eliezer could not come up with an answer. Even before being deported to concentration camp, Eliezer still prayed. Things begin to change when Eliezer arrives at concentration camp in Auschwitz. After witnessing the incineration of small children, Eliezer expresses deep resentment towards God for remaining silent and allowing this to happen.
Throughout the novel, enormous remarkable changes occurred in the father son relationship between Eliezer’s and his father. To highlight a few, we will discuss Eliezer and his father’s emotional change, the connection between them as father and son, and how their build trust in their relationship. Eliezer’s relationship with his father is quite important as it allows them both to live through the anguish and despair brought upon them. And their love for each other helped them both stay alive during the course of torture that Jews people were put through.
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel faces the horrors of the Holocaust, where he loses many friends and family, and almost his life. He starts as a kind young boy, however, his environment influences many of the decisions he makes. Throughout the novel, Elie Wiesel changes into a selfish boy, thinks of his father as a liability and loses his faith in God as an outcome his surroundings.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a horrific story based on the true events of his torturous Holocaust experiences from 1944 to 1945. He suffered greatly. This book is full of tragic and painstaking memories. Even though Wiesel describes his adversity, his brave actions still show through and that is what makes this story monumental.
Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiographical novel recording Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the World War II holocaust. As a 15 year old boy Elie was torn from his home and placed in a concentration camp. He and his father were separated from his mother and his sisters. It is believed that they were put to death in the fiery pits of Auschwitz. The entire story is one of calm historical significance while there is a slight separation between the emotional trauma of what are occurring, and the often-detached voice of the author.
Eliezer loses faith in god. He struggles physically and mentally for life and no longer believes there is a god. "Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to dust..."(pg 32). Elie worked hard to save himself and asks god many times to help him and take him out of his misery. "Why should I bless his name? The eternal, lord of the universe, the all-powerful and terrible was silent..."(pg 31). Eliezer is confused, because he does not know why the Germans would kill his face, and does not know why god could let such a thing happen. "I did not deny god's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice..."(pg 42). These conditions gave him confidence, and courage to live.
Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” shows the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Their life long journey begins from when they are taken from their home in Sighet, they experience harsh and inhuman conditions in the camps. These conditions cause Elie and his father’s relationship to change. During their time there, Elie and his father experience a reversal in roles.
The determining concern of survival confronts both Elie and Chlomo throughout Night. The concept of survival is illustrated by the complications brought upon Elie and Chlomo. Elie and Chlomo believe they could only survive the concentration camps with one another; the father-and-son link was held together for the survival of each other. One complication in particular, was the i...
Night by Elie Wiesel is one man’s story of surviving the holocaust and his struggle with maintaining relationships with his family and other Jews as they are dehumanized by their captivity and conditions. Through the characterization in the book as well as through the recounting of his journey, itself, Wiesel tells the story of how humankind can dehumanize others and cause the captives to also begin to dehumanize one another.
Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel. This autobiography of Wiesel’s life manages to reach the perfect balance between an in-depth story and simplistic writing. The novel tells of a young Elie’s journey from the invasion of his tight knit Jewish community in Sighet to the numerous concentration camps he was taken to. One camp was Auschwitz, where his mother and younger sister Tzipora were separated from him and his father. Later on, Elie and his father were taken to Camp Buna, a sub-camp of Auschwitz. Finally, Elie was taken to his third and last camp, Buchenwald. Buchenwald is where Elie’s father ultimately died of dysentery, only days before the American troops came to release them. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses the title night to symbolize the darkness of these events and the lifelessness of faith.
Night by Elie Wiesel is major memoir in which sold over 6 million copies after being sold. It shows the gruesome terror of the concentration camps and how Elie reacts and changes to these terrors. Elie and his family leave the safety of their homes to survive the terrible concentrations camps, enduring hardships, death, and emerging as a more stronger, improved people. Elie experiences changes both his ideas of religious and physical changes.
When people are placed in difficult, desolate situations, they often change in a substantial way. In Night by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist, Elie, is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp where he undergoes many devastating experiences. Due to these traumatic events, Elie changes drastically, losing his passion in God, becoming disconnected with his father, and maturing when it matters most.
Night is the true story of what Elie Wiesel went through during World War II. this book was first written in french, in 1955 and then translated english in 1958. during world war II, the jews were naive and hoped for better times. Even though the situation was always getting worse. In night, Wiesel describes elements of the war that any survivor knew about. he shows us how before the war nobody could imagine such horrible events occurring. the book sends a message stating that everything bad was happening around them the jews were still hoping for better times. Wiesel shows us that still believed in humanity, they did not think such bad events can occur and how even though they had multiple chance of escaping they did not.
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a fiction memoir following the protagonist Eliezer, who is a stand-in character for the author, and his family in their journey through concentration camps in the Holocaust. The book mainly explores religious intolerance and within this explores man’s inhumanity to man through Wiesel’s sustained figurative language and descriptive imagery. At the beginning of the book Eliezer and his family are moved via cattle cars with other Jewish people. Towards the second half of the book an Eliezer and his father are once again transported on cattle cars through several German towns. On both trips the Jewish people were vilified and treated like animals by the German soldiers.