Commentary On Night By Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.

Due to the atrocities of the concentration camps, Elie lost his faith in God. Early on in the story, Elie used to leap over ancient temples and study the Kabbalah. In his old town, he used to complain to Moishe the Beadle “ I told him how unhappy I was not to able to find in Sighet a master to teach me the Zohar.”(Wiesel,5) This shows him complaining about not having a teacher. But as he started to go through the camps, he saw what was going on and started to

wonder why he would believe in someone who could allow such terrible things to happen. While in Auschwitz, he heard men speak of God, but he himself was starting to wonder why he should believe in someone who refused to help them “I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His justice.”(Wiesel, 45) This shows Elie believing in the almighty master of the universe, but not believing His knowledge of right from wrong.

The terrible things that happened at Auschwitz changed his relationship with his father.

When they first arrived at the camp, his father asked their Blockalteste where the toilets were. “Then as if waking from a deep sleep, he slapped my father with such force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours. I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck in front of me, and I had not even blinked...Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh.”(Wiesel,39) This shows that Elie would have beaten the guard had he been allowed to. This next quote shows Elie much later, near Buchenwald in a cattle car, cramped and starving. His father’s corpse has just been thrown off the train “And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like:Free at last!...”(Wiesel,112) This shows Elie thinking that if he searched inside himself for remorse, he would have found something that said he was free from a

burden.

Elie has changed in many ways besides the ones listed in this essay. He has experienced many terrible things that he should not have from seeing others die to being starved. This memoir has been an excellent source of information to find out what happened at the camps through the eyes of a young man. Not only does it show what happened, but it showed a change in a boy of only 13 who used to leap of temples and study the Kabbalah, to a man who looked like a corpse and when his father passed on, he thought of it as freedom. It is important to understand what happened during the Holocaust so we can stop it from happening a second time, anyway possible.