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Summary of the book the night
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Elie was facing his punishment because he walked in on Idek on a private moment. The only thoughts running through his mind were: " If only I could answer him, if only I could tell him that I could not move. But my mouth would not open." The text illustrates the pain taking over Elie's body as he was being whipped by Idek. This quote demonstrates his silence because he was unable to speak nor could he contradict his superior's motive. Elie Wiesel was stating that although your voice is always with you, sometimes it is inappropriate and not allowed. An upstander is one who stands up for what they believe in and against an act of injustice or intolerance. A character that demonstrates this trait in the novel, "Night", would be the French woman
Elie explains that the book has been translated a few times, and demonstrates this with a powerful and effective sample. Here is a portion of it. “My father no longer felt the club’s blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father, I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse; I was angry with him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS.”(preface xii). Elie tries to clarify that this book is his point of view, not proven statistics. These personal statements are why the story is so effective. The emotions you feel for Elie’s hardships are hard not to relate to. Throughout the whole book, Elie lives through many hardships and tells you them from his point of view, or something he learned from someone else. From the peaceful town of Sighet, to the grim introduction into selection, and later he tells you about concentration camp life. “The march towards the chimneys looming in the distance under an indifferent sky. The infants thrown into fiery ditches... I did
When spending time as a prisoner, many things come to mind. How to achieve survival, when is the next shipment of food coming, why is the only person who will keep their promise the man holding me behind bars? In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is taken from his hometown and placed in Auschwitz to do hard labour until he is transferred to the Buna prison camp. While in Buna, Elie works until the end of WWII. During the time Night takes place, Elie is 15 years of age, a 10th grader. When put in Auschwitz, Elie has only his father even though on arrival, he was also with his mother and two sisters. During this “[s]lim novel of terrifying power” (New York Times 2008) Elie has his coming of age moment along with some questions and a very powerful statement that “[n]ever shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself [sic].”. (Wiesel 34). Elie
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
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.
Many people have given speeches like his, but the significance of this lecture was the passion he showed and still felt for this Earth, and its people, after all the horrible events that had happened to him in his life. He tells anyone who will listen to his speech to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. Wiesel vocalizes that being a bystander and allowing bad things to happen is just as bad, in his mind, as being the person who actually does those bad things. Elie Wiesel says, “In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.” Through his speech he tries to get anyone that is willing to listen to stop just accepting that the world is evil. He tells them to try and change it. The audience in the room he was speaking to never stood up and applauded. Instead, the audience gave Wiesel their undivided attention, never saying a
Diction Analysis: The diction in this quote sets the tone for the rest of the passage ahead because it shows how weak Elie and his family are compared to the Nazi’s. Repetition in this quote has a deeper meaning then some may first take it. The repetition of “first” shows in this shows a sign of internal defeat. Elie says “it was the first time” he had ever seen his father cry. By stating not only he saw his father cry but it was also the first time in Elie’s 14 years, shows how weak his father felt at this point. He continues on to say he “never thought it was possible” which shows how he saw his father as this strong, undefeatable man but now he is seeing him at his lowest point which bring Elie to the realization of how bad everything that's
“Even in darkness, it is possible to create light”(Wiesel). In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author, as a young boy who profoundly believed in his religion, experiences the life of a prisoner in the Holocaust. He struggles to stay with his father while trying to survive. Through his experience, he witnesses the changes in his people as they fight each other for themselves. He himself also notices the change within himself. In Night, it is discovered that atrocities and cruel treatment can make decent people into brutes. Elie himself also shows signs of becoming a brute for his survival, but escapes this fate, which is shown through his interactions with his father.
..., which made him more upset because it was his own father. Also, he speaks about reaching down into his inner conscious to find out why he really was not as upset and he would have been if it were the first week in the camp. Elie believes that if he reached into his thoughts he would have come up with something like: “Free at last!...”(112).
For instance, in chapter four of the book, Mr. Wiesel describes how the Kapo, Idek, in his block had a bad temper and he would sometimes take it out on Elie. Actually, as Mr. Wiesel says, “One day when Idek was seized with one of his fits of frenzy, I got in his way. He leapt on me, like a wild animal, hittin me in the chest, on the head, throwing me down and pulling me up again, his blows getting more and more violent, until I was covered with blood”(Wiesel 50). In other words, Mr. Wiesel is saying that he was just working, doing what he was supposed to, but since Idek was angry he took it out on Elie. Now, people may think that Elie could have done something, like fight back, but that would cause him to become a brute, which he did not want to become. Also if he fought back he would not only have been a brute, he would have used up his strength and could have been killed, or died.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, it talks about the holocaust and what it was like being in it. The Germans were trying to make the German race the supreme race. To do this they were going to kill off everyone that wasn’t a German. If you were Jewish or something other than German, you would have been sent to a concentration camp and segregated by men and women. If you weren’t strong enough you were sent to the crematory to be cremated. If you were strong enough you were sent to work at a labor camp. With all the warnings the Jewish people had numerous chances to run from the Germans, but most ignored the warnings.
It is reported that over 6 million Jews were brutally murdered in the Holocaust, but there were a very few who were able to reach the liberation, and escape alive. There were many important events that occurred in Elie Wiesel’s Night, and for each and every event, I was equally, if not more disturbed than the one before. The first extremely disturbing event became a reality when Eliezer comprehended that there were trucks filled with babies that the Nazi’s were throwing the children into the crematorium. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the murdering babies was clearly presented through, “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there, […] babies”, (Wiesel, Night, 32). This was one of the most disturbing events of the narrative for myself and truly explained the cruelty and torture of the Holocaust.
Through the Holocaust, Elie learned that silence is not an answer to oppression. At first, he couldn’t believe the cruelty and pain the Nazis were inflicting. He said, “’I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes,’” (Page 33, Night). Then, Elie came to realize the world was staying silent. He saw that people were suffering and dying, and all of humankind backed away in fear or indifference. Seeing this happen in the time he was at the camp made
Have you ever stood up for someone or something, even if it risked your own life? An upstander is someone who sees something harmful happening and tries their best to help out without second guessing themselves. Rosa parks is an inspirational role model to women and men all around the world. Rosa Parks has been a leader since she was a kid at school. She never dropped out like many of her peers until she had to help her dying grandmother. Rosa Parks risked her life as an upstander for African American equality, and inspired many others to follow in her footsteps.
In the book Night, Elie Wiesel uses specific devices to create a rhetorical effect. Thought how do these devices enhance the theme of this text? Surely he could have conveyed his story without them. Even though it would have lacked character. Though in the book Night Elie Wiesel used devices like imagery, foreshadowing, etc to give his story more depth and to have the reader emotionally engaged in the story.
Source #1 is a quote by Prince Emir Faysal at the paris peace conference in 1919. The quote reads “The arabs have long suffered under foreign domination. The hour has come into our own again… Why should not the Arabs rule the country where they live and have lived for countless generations? Why should we not be the masters in our own house?”. What Faysal is saying is that the Arabs were tired of their countries being ruled by others and wanted to govern themselves, they wanted to become a sovereign nation free to control themselves. If they became independent they would control everything in their country so that they could make things the way they and their people want it, but by doing so they make the country currently in charge pissed. Like