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Essays about the survivors of the Holocaust
Holocaust survivors and their stories
Essays about the survivors of the Holocaust
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Life has many struggles, and we face them every day. Eliezer Wiesel’s book, Night, is a memoir that shows the struggles he has faced in the Holocaust. Wiesel shows many changes throughout, physically and mentally. In the book, Wiesel is taken from his home and put through various of concentration camps. He was a strong believer in his religion before the camps, and after, he has become different. Traumatic experience form people into a different mental and physical state. In the beginning, Eliezer lived in Transylvania with his sisters and his parents and studied his religion.“By day, I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the Temple” (Wiesel 3). During that scene, Eliezer talks about
Eliezer later went to other concentration camps in Bakenau and Buna. During these years in the camps he lived through great suffering. Starvation, and survival. He also witnesses thousands of people die and murdered including his own father. Eliezer was finally shipped to Buchenwald. Which would end up being his last stay at any concentration camp. It was now the year 1945 and this ordeal was finally over.
The book, Night, by Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel, entails the story of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps all around Europe. Around the middle of the 20th century in the early 1940s, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army traveled around Europe in an effort to exterminate the Jewish population. As they went to through different countries in order to enforce this policy, Nazi officers sent every Jewish person they found to a concentration camp. Often called death camps, the main purpose was to dispose of people through intense work hours and terrible living conditions. Wiesel writes about his journey from a normal, happy life to a horrifying environment surrounded by death in the Nazi concentration camps. Night is an amazingly
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
Night is an autobiography by a man named Eliezer Wiesel. The autobiography is a quite disturbing record of Elie’s childhood in the Nazi death camps Auschwitz and Buchenwald during world war two. While Night is Elie Wiesel’s testimony about his experiences in the Holocaust, Wiesel is not, precisely speaking, the story’s protagonist. Night is narrated by a boy named Eliezer who represents Elie, but details set apart the character Eliezer from the real life Elie. For instance, Eliezer wounds his foot in the concentration camps, while Elie actually wounded his knee. Wiesel fictionalizes seemingly unimportant details because he wants to distinguish his narrator from himself. It is almost impossibly painful for a survivor to write about his Holocaust experience, and the mechanism of a narrator allows Wiesel to distance himself somewhat from the experience, to look in from the outside.
In Eliezer Wiesel’s novel “Night”, it depicts the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Both Eliezer and his father are taken from their home, where they would experience inhuman and harsh conditions in the camps. The harsh conditions cause Eliezer and his father’s relationship to change. During their time in the camps, Eliezer Wiesel and his father experience a reversal of their roles.
Eliezer was a strict Jew who practiced religion and observed all Jewish holidays. As a child he was very devoted and focused all his energy to study Judaism. He grew up loving God with the belief that God is more powerful than anything else in this universe. He believed that with all the power God has, he is capable to put an end to all this awful suffering. Living and witnessing all this misery and have God not do anything about it makes him questions God.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night.
“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.
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.
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.
Some of the most fabled stories of our time come from individuals overcoming impossible odds and surviving horrific situations. This is prevalent throughout the Holocaust. People are fascinated with this event in history because the survivors had to overcome immense odds. One, of many, of the more famous stories about the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel. Through this medium, Wiesel still manages to capture the horrors of the camps, despite the reader already knowing the story.
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.
Elie’s loss of innocence and childhood lifestyle is very pronounced within the book, Night. This book, written by the main character, Elie Wiesel, tells the readers about the experiences of Mr. Wiesel during the Holocaust. The book starts off by describing Elie’s life in his hometown, Sighet, with his family and friends. As fascism takes over Hungary, Elie and his family are sent north, to Auschwitz concentration camp. Elie stays with his father and speaks of his life during this time. Later, after many stories of the horrors and dehumanizing acts of the camp, Elie and his father make the treacherous march towards Gliewitz. Then they are hauled to Buchenwald by way of cattle cars in extremely deplorable conditions, even by Holocaust standards. The book ends as Elie’s father is now dead and the American army has liberated them. As Elie is recovering in the hospital he gazes at himself in a mirror, he subtly notes he much he has changed. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie loses his innocence and demeanour because he was traumatized by what he saw in the camps, his loss of faith in a God who stood idly by while his people suffered, and becoming selfish as he is forced to become selfish in the death camps to survive.
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.