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More handpicked essays just for you.
Horrors of the Holocaust (Jews)
Horrors of the Holocaust (Jews)
Horrors of the Holocaust (Jews)
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Before Elie goes to the concentration camp he is the cosseted son of a rich and influential man. His life turns only around his belief in god. He is even angry with his father because he doesn’t let him fast and study the Kabbalah. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night on p. 4 Elie asks his father to find him a master who could guide him in his studies of Kabbalah but his father responds “You are too young for that…..First you must study the basic subjects, those you are able to comprehend.” But already when Elie arrives in the concentration camp he starts to doubt in god because he sees a truck unloading little children in a huge fire. After all the new arrivals start to pray a death prayer for themselves but Elie only thinks “The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (p.33) He can’t imagine that there is a good and almighty god when as …show more content…
It’s imaginable that he goes through all kinds of feelings, possibly also anger because he remembered how naive he was and how often he could have escaped. Elie probably feels that he has to talk to people for letting them know what happened and maybe he realized that writing his story down was helping him to recover. It seems like it worked since he was able to revisit Auschwitz in his seventies he must have come over everything. He must have forgiven himself for for what he did wrong and maybe he remembered also faith even when he didn’t believe in god as person anymore. When he revisits Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey he wrote forty-seven books but he tells her that he’s still not satisfied with his work “I believe often that I haven’t even begun.” (9:24 min. , Elie Wiesel) Probably he felt that a live long that he didn’t tell enough and that there are so many more thoughts that he have to share with the
Before Elie’s hometown got invaded, he was extremely religious. He used to pray and feel the presence of God all around him causing him to shed tears of joy and even began
He had strong faith in God but yet as the story goes on, the camp starts to affect him and slowly loses faith. At the beginning, Elie is really close to God and expresses his faith greatly. “ By day i studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” (4). He studied the Talmud, which is the study of Jewish faith, everyday when he wasn’t in the camp, and he wept over the destruction of the temple. He wouldn’t have cared for any of this if he didn't have strong faith and believe in God. Now as the story progresses, that slowly begins to change. “ Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would i bless him? Every fiber in my body rebelled.” (67). Elie couldn’t find a reason to. He thought, why would a God let something so horrible happen to all the Jews. He couldn’t apprehend it therefore he questioned his faith in
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
However, there were warnings by some people that Jewish people were being deported and killed. Although no one believes these warnings, Elie and his family are taken to a ghetto where they have no food. After being in the ghetto, Elie and his father were separated from Elie’s mother and sister because of selection and were placed in cattle cars where they had no room. They are taken to Auschwitz where they suffer from hunger, beatings, and humiliation from the guards which causes Elie’s father to become weak. By now Elie has lost his faith in God because of all he has been through.
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
Elie Wiesel has gone through more in life than any of us could ever imagine. One of my favorite quotes from him says, “To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” In his novel “Night” we are given an in-depth look at the pure evil that was experienced during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. We see as Wiesel goes from a faithful, kind Jewish boy to a survivor. As he experiences these events they change him drastically. We first see a boy with a feeling of hope and ignorance as his hometown is occupied and he’s moved into the ghettos. Then as he’s transferred to a concentration camp he questions his faith and slowly loses a sense of who he once was. But all of this puts him in an important position, he knows that he must share with the world what
The Holocaust was a test of faith for all the Jews that were involved. There were several instances in the book Night when Elie’s faith was hindered. Not only was his faith in God tested, but also his faith in himself and his fellow man. Although the trials of the Holocaust were detrimental to Elie’s faith at the time, a number of the Jews’ strengthened by the test. Whenever the Holocaust began, Elie was very young and wasn’t sure what to believe or understand everything yet, causing him to go back and forth on how he felt and what he believed. The people around him were a tremendous impact on what he was thinking and believing. The state that people came out of the Holocaust heavily depended on who they were when they went in and what they
It is so strenuous to be faithful when you are a walking cadaver and all you can think of is God. You devote your whole life to Him and he does not even have the mercy set you free. At the concentration camp, many people were losing faith. Not just in God, but in themselves too. Elie Wiesel uses many literary devices, including tone, repetition and irony to express the theme, loss of faith. He uses tone by quoting men at the camp and how they are craving for God to set them free. He also uses repetition. He starts sentences with the same opening, so that it stays in the reader’s head. Finally, he uses irony to allude to loss of faith. Elie understands how ironic it is to praise someone so highly, only to realize they will not have mercy on you. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses tone, repetition and irony illustrate the loss of faith the prisoners were going through.
Elie's genuine belief in God helps him before being sent away to the concentration camps. On an average day-to-day basis, Elie "studied Talmud and by night ...would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple" (p.3). He is committed to his studies of Jewish mysticism and from this, is passionate about religion and God Himself. By embedding his life into God and religion, Elie puts his sense of comfort and security into Him, as well as his complete faith. Elie's faith in God is ...
The truth is, he took a vow of silence about what had happened in the concentration camps. Actually, he had not spoken about it for ten years (Elie Wiesel Biography). Maybe not talking made it easier to not think about the horror. People tend to not talk about what they want to forget. Then, for those who believe in fate, Elie Wiesel was scheduled to interview Francois Mauriac. According to the forward written by Francois Mauriac in Night, their conversation went from work to personal. Mr. Mauriac was expressing how horrible it must have been for the Jews crammed in the cattle cars, and Elie Wiesel decided to break his silence and said, “I was one of them.” As a result of this conversation, Mr. Mauriac convinced Mr. Wiesel that his story was important and needed to be told, “he could put a face to the suffering of the Holocaust”. (The Life and Work of Wiesel). During a lecture upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize he reminded everyone that while they were prisoners, they were stripped of everything human. As a result, they lived in a complete void. They were constantly told to forget everything, forget where they came from, and to forget who they were. Mr. Wiesel described how the memory protects its wounds by trying to forget painful events. More importantly, Elie Wiesel stated that, “For us, forgetting was never an option.” Those that survived felt that they needed to document what they had witnessed.
“He’s the man who’s lived through hell without every hating. Who’s been exposed to the most depraved aspects of human nature but still manages to find love, to believe in God, to experience joy.” This was a quote said by Oprah Winfrey during her interview with Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor. No person who has not experienced the Holocaust and all its horrors could ever relate to Elie Wiesel. He endured massive amounts of torture, physically, mentally, and emotionally just because he was a Jew. One simple aspect of Wiesel’s life he neither chose or could changed shaped his life. It is important to take a look at Wiesel’s life to see the pain that he went through and try to understand the experiences that happened in his life. Elie Wiesel is a well respected, influential figure with an astonishing life story. Although Elie Wiesel had undergone some of the harshest experiences possible, he was still a man able to enjoy life after the Holocaust.
Elie was a man of faith, who prayed daily. From his perspective, he was abandoned by his God, Yahweh. Elie wrote “Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria burning day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death?” (67). Elie is thinking this, while a prayer is said at the Appelplatz, praising on Yahweh, Rosh Hashanah. In
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. Yet, after he had been exposed to the reality of the concentration camps, Elie began to question God. According to Elie, God “caused thousands of children to burn...He kept six crematoria working day and night...He created Auschwitz, Birkenau, [and] Buna”(67). Elie could not believe the atrocities going on around him. He could not believe that the God he followed tolerated such things. During times of sorrow, when everyone was praying and sanctifying His name, Elie no longer wanted to praise the Lord; he was at the point of giving up. The fact that the “Terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent”(33) caused Elie to lose hope and faith. When one cho...
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...
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