A statement from the nonfiction novella Night –a personal account of Elie Wiesel’s experience during the Holocaust—reads as follows: “How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou. Almighty, Master of the universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces” (67). War is a concept that is greatly looked down upon in most major religions and cultures, yet it has become an inevitable adversity of human nature. Due to war’s inhumane circumstances and the mass destruction it creates, it has been a major cause for many followers of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions to turn from their faith. Followers of religion cannot comprehend how their loving god could allow them to suffer and many devout …show more content…
soldiers could not fathom God allowing such horrors to occur. The presence of war has even become an argument for God’s inexistence by claiming that God cannot be real because of the way he lets his own creations suffer through wards and conflicts. The struggle to maintain faith through wartime is a universal phenomenon that has been responsible for a huge decrease in the population of followers of religion; however, God allows war because He gave humanity the gift of free will and without it we would not be human. Without bad there would be no good. Through data it is evident that there was a decline in the importance of religion during and after World War I. Religious leaders struggled to explain the senseless horrors that the war entailed. Veterans of the First World War left battle psychologically damaged from the horrors they had witnessed and joined the Lost Generation as nonbelievers of any higher power. Though World War I was deemed as “the war to end all wars,” a second world-wide war was not far behind and was ironically thought to have been caused by the first. Many nonfiction works and novels recount the barbarity and destruction of World War II that caused so many of the people affected to lose faith. Closely related World War II, The Holocaust was a genocide in which the Nazi regime persecuted and murdered approximately six-million Jews and other races that were seen as inferior. This mass murder made most any Jew involved questions his or her faith. In most post-Holocaust interviews, Jewish survivors of concentration camps recall their constant battle with maintaining faith. Soldiers of the later Vietnam War also struggled with maintaining their faith, as well as average, due to the amount of casualties. Many memoirs written by soldiers detail the destruction that took place overseas. Terrorism and the War on Terror have also greatly affected believers in the United States due to its closeness and the destruction taking place on American soil. Attacks such as 9/11 that affected American families caused many to lose faith in not only God but the government as well. Terrorism and all other wars are very serious and the major loss resulted in a huge societal move from God due to loss of faith. World War I brought forth a new and inhumane fighting style that shocked the world with its cruelty. The struggle for those affected to maintain faith is heavily seen in World War I due to the great loss of human life. A quote from a section on Intellectual and Religious Trends in an encyclopedia on the interwar period noted the decrease in society’s following of God by informing that “the barbarism of World War convinced many that the previous century’s faith in reason and progress was misplaced. This revolt went in two directions. On the continent, existentialism rose to prominence” (483). The newly recognized horrors or World War I convinced many devout citizens to not only reject religion, but lose faith in humanity all together. In an article entitled “Religious Mobilization and popular belief,” author Patrick Houlihan further explains why so many lost their faith after World War I took place. The Great War only reaffirmed atheists in their beliefs and caused some religious people to lose faith entirely; according to Houlihan, this was due to “The immense horrors of battlefield carnage” that caused soldiers to lose their faith, and “believers on the home front lost faith as their loved ones vanished”. The loss of belief is represented in a lot of the letters written by soldiers who were close to the heart of battle. Even when society believed that there could be no worse horrors, a new era of war and weaponry evolved that later became known as World War II. World War II introduced a totally new and powerful threat to humanity: atomic power.
Atomic power posed a huge threat to nations involved in the Second World War giving any nation that acquired it the upper hand in battle. A political cartoon from the Chicago Tribune that was drawn by Carl Somdal was published in 1945 depicting a soldier standing in front of an explosion on a book titled “Science” while holding an American flag titled “Victory”. This science-themed cartoon represents how the United States relied on science rather than God to earn victory over Japan due to their loss of faith. On August 12, 1945, the St. Louis Post- Dispatch published a political cartoon titled “A New Era in Man’s Understanding” that pictured a large hand descending from the sky and striking the earth with a lightning bolt labeled as atomic power. This cartoon represents how nations were willing to act as God and play with life and death as the United States did in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When nations become God-like by taking matters such as life and death into their own hands, it is evident that there is no longer room for God when the individual becomes his or her own sovereign
leader. A prime example of self-apotheosis in war would be Adolf Hitler and his mass genocide of races that he deemed to be unworthy; this would later be known as The Holocaust. The nonfiction novel Night, Elie Wiesel explores this topic and perfectly illustrates the struggle to maintain faith that Jews who were placed in concentration camps experienced during The Holocaust. Wiesel recalls realizing the horrors of Birkenau concentration camp and losing his unconditional devotion to God by expressing his anger through rhetorical questions such as “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” (74). The rapid, thought-like structure of this quote greatly represents the thought process and internalized struggle that all Jews experienced while imprisoned in concentration camps. The absolute inhumane conditions made it hard to believe that a God could allow his own creations and followers to endure such cruelty. Another quote that portrays Wiesel’s complete loss of faith is his statement “As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying his existence, but I doubted His absolute justice” (53). This quote holds importance because it identifies how many victims of war’s cruelty do not deny God’s existence but rather reject a God they believe to be indifferent to their suffering. Holocaust victims lost faith because in their eyes, God took on a different persona –a persona they did not want to praise. War not only shakes Christian’s faith but also those faiths trusted in family and government. A trending hashtag on Twitter became popular in 2014 titled “#Vietnam6words” where Vietnam veterans tweeted six words that described and summarized their experience in the war. An example of losing faith in one’s self is the tweet “18, and going where? #Vietnam What are your 6 words? Share your #Vietnam6words at Stripes.com/Vietnam50” (Henderson). This tweet is an example of how soldiers in Vietnam began to lose faith not only in God’s plan for them but in themselves. A personal tweet from a Vietnam veteran was also posted to this hashtag in 2015 reading “Our leaders didn’t care calculating attrition. #Vietnam What are your 6 words? Share your #Vietnam6words at Stripes.com/Vietnam50” (Daley). This personal account provides an example of the loss of faith and trust in the government during the Vietnam War by accusing government leaders of not caring about the United States’ involvement in Vietnam since they would not have to deal with the consequences. Rather it be religion, family, government, or one’s self, war creates a universal movement towards the loss of faith. One of the closest and most recent wars that the United States has been actively involved in is the War on Terror that has affected many countries around the world in very personal ways. Pat Patrick, a women’s spirituality examiner on Examiner.com, analyzed what caused someone to lose their faith in religion after 9/11 by implementing the quote “For some, turning inward in grief caused them to lose their religion. One woman who lost her son on that day recalls, ‘My faith is shaken? Earthquake is a better word,’ she said. ‘In the end I found myself asking what kind of God would allow this’”. In regards to the horrors of 9/11, losing faith after such terrible tragedies was and is not uncommon. In many situations, families were torn apart and their children were taken from them which Patrick alludes to when asserting that “Lisa Miller, a scholar of religion and mental health at Columbia University, said losing faith is an understandable and normal reaction to tragedy, especially after the loss of a child”. Losing a child is one of the most devastating psychological pains a human can experience and it is often caused due to acts of war. 9/11 and its resolutions were a big cause in not only America’s developing distrust of the Bush administration and the government but in religion itself. The horrors of 9/11 were also the doings of Islamic religious radicals which did not set religion in a positive light. Unfortunately war is an ineluctable part of humanity due to humans’ tendency to strive for positions of power. The affects and cruelties of war will forever remain an argument against faith in government, humanity, and God Himself until a logical reasoning for war that outweighs the emotional horrors it ensues is discovered and understood by all. So why does God allow war? He allows it so mankind can experience a world cut off from Him and so that we as humans can enjoy the gift of free will and the knowledge of good and evil as Adam and Eve made it so. Truly, humanity brings sorrow and destruction upon themselves, and their faith in all things, no matter if it be in God, themselves, or the establishment, is the truest test in life.
An estimated 11 million people died in the Holocaust. 6 million were Jews. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel tells his story as a Holocaust survivor. Throughout his book he describes the tremendous obstacles he overcame, not only himself, but with his father as well. The starvation and cruel treatment did not help while he was there. Elie makes many choices that works to his advantage. Choice plays a greater factor in surviving Auschwitz.
Night is a dramatic book that tells the horror and evil of the concentration camps that many were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout the book the author Elie Wiesel, as well as many prisoners, lost their faith in God. There are many examples in the beginning of Night where people are trying to keep and strengthen their faith but there are many more examples of people rebelling against God and forgetting their religion.
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.
In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel changes immensely by the experiences he encounters on his journey through the ghettos, labor camps, and concentration camps. These experiences alter his perspective and faith in humanity; consequently distorting his personality. At the beginning of the book, Wiesel is a religious and faithful teenager. He wants to expand his religious studies to mysticism and explore the Jewish religion as well. This begins to fade when he realizes that Jewish people, including babies and small children, are being burned in the crematorium and thrown into mass graves or holes in the ground. He also sees others being tortured and starved by the S.S officers. As a result, he begins to realize that if God was the divine
In the 1930s-1940s, the Nazis took millions of Jews into their death camps. They exterminated children, families, and even babies. Elie Wiesel was one of the few who managed to live through the war. However, his life was forever scarred by things he witnessed in these camps. The book Night explained many of the harsh feelings that Elie Wiesel experienced in his time in various German concentration camps. Prior to being taken, it is known that Wiesel was very strong in his beliefs of God and the ideas behind the Jewish religion. However, he questioned God while he endured the torture that the Nazis inflicted on many different races. He questioned why God had done this to these innocent people. Elie Wiesel lost much of his faith while in the
The significance of night throughout the novel Night by Elie Wiesel shows a poignant view into the daily life of Jews throughout the concentration camps. Eliezer describes each day as if there was not any sunshine to give them hope of a new day. He used the night to symbolize the darkness and eeriness that were brought upon every Jew who continued to survive each day in the concentration camps. However, night was used as an escape from the torture Eliezer and his father had to endure from the Kapos who controlled their barracks. Nevertheless, night plays a developmental role of Elie throughout he novel.
Adriana Throughout the narrative Night, the author Elie Wiesel, a young teen who was very confident in his faith, experiences multiple hardships that cause him to question what he once believed to be true. His religion stayed strong until it became obvious to him that God was causing his people to suffer. When Eliezer was just a young boy at fifteen years old, he was extremely interested in Judaism, he wanted to learn everything he possibly could. However, his father did not want him to study the Cabbala until he was thirty years old. Eliezer could not wait this long, so he sought wisdom from a man named Moshe Beadle.
Inked on the pages of Elie Wiesel’s Night is the recounting of him, a young Jewish boy, living through the mass genocide that was the Holocaust. The words written so eloquently are full of raw emotions depict his journey from a simple Jewish boy to a man who was forced to see the horrors of the world. Within this time period, between beatings and deaths, Wiesel finds himself questioning his all loving and powerful God. If his God loved His people, then why would He allow such a terrible thing to happen? Perhaps Wiesel felt abandoned by his God, helpless against the will of the Nazis as they took everything from him.
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
The section in the novel night that painted a dark and angry picture of human nature is when the Jews were fleeing Buna and hundreds of them were packed in a roofless cattle car. The Jews were only provided with a blanket that soon became soaked by the snowfall. They spent days in the bitter cold temperatures and all they ate was snow. For these reasons, many suffered and died. When they stopped in German towns, the people stared at that cattle cars filled with soulless bodies. “They would stop and look at [the Jews] without surprise.” It was a regular occasion for the German people to see suffering Jews and not feel pity. The dark and angry picture of human nature was when a German worker “took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it
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.
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.
In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel remembers his time at Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Elie begins to lose his faith in God after his faith is tested many times while at the concentration camp. Elie conveys to us how horrific events have changed the way he looks at his faith and God. Through comments such as, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God, my soul, and turned my dreams into dust,” he reveals the toll that the Holocaust has taken on him. The novel begins during the years of 1942-1944 in Sighet, Transylvannia, Romania. Elie Wiesel and his family are deported and Elie is forced to live through many horrific events. Several events such as deportation, seeing dead bodies while at Auschwitz, and separation from his mother and sisters, make Elie start to question his absolute faith in God.
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.
Family relationships heavily influences a person’s development, and in times of crisis this correlation intensifies profoundly. Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, writes a profound autobiography about his journey and experiences surviving the Holocaust. Many lessons can be learned while reading passage, one of these being family relationships. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel uses a couple different family relationships to show how family relationships have a huge impact on an individual’s ability to survive.