On the basis of genocide, the loss of hope is a primary focus. According to dictionary.com, “Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best.” This feeling eventually becomes lost by many who endure the suffering of a genocide. Hope can be lost in many different ways, whether it be from an outside force or an internal struggle. Since the loss of hope is unavoidable, the ability to be hopeful dwindles as prisoners live through horrific camp conditions. When Wiesel and others at the concentration camp start to question God, hope becomes lost. During the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah, Wiesel feels a different relationship with God when he states, “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer …show more content…
Rosh Hashanah is meant to be a religious holiday celebrating new beginnings. In the concentration camp, the SS punishes Wiesel and other Jewish people for their faith. This creates a different relationship with religion for Wiesel. He gets angry with God and questions why God will not intervene. Since Wiesel no longer has his faith to allow him to feel secure, he loses hope as a result. Although Wiesel feels a sense of power when he accuses God, he also feels a sense of isolation without his faith. This displays a loss of hope, as Wiesel no longer feels trust in God. Besides losing hope involving religion, the loss of hope for continuing to live and persevere also occurs. While spending more time in the camp, the hope for survival and liberation becomes slim. When the SS forces the prisoners to run to an unknown location in the freezing winter, Wiesel thinks to himself, “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist in the world. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing. To break rank, to let myself slide to the side of the road” (86). Survival becomes increasingly difficult as each night passes in the …show more content…
I stand in the open, not caring if I live or die.My thin body is in complete tremor.I wrap both arms around my bony chest to stop the trembling.Drop to the ground. Close my eyes. And wake up seeing one dewdrop hanging on the tip of one wind-beaten blade” (112). The loss of hope exists in the Cambodian genocide as well. Huy is only an eight-year-old girl who still faces the same pain and loss of hope as the older victims. At this pivotal moment, Huy feels like she can’t continue on. She no longer cares about life or death due to the conditions and heartbreak she endures. Huy falling to the ground signifies a sense of defeat due to the events she relives everyday at the camp. This conveys how victims of genocide often lose hope after horrific trauma, which connects the experiences of both Wiesel and Huy. As a result of genocides inflicting conflict amongst those who endure it, the aspect of hope becomes lost. Many alive during the Holocaust and Cambodian genocide never get the chance to experience a new chapter of freedom. This new chapter is full of abundance and hope for new beginnings. The stories of Wiesel and Huy capture an essence of hope being hard to find and carry throughout the
Elie Wiesel once said, “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” The book Night is a tragic story written by a holocaust survivor. It includes many of the things Jews endured in concentration camps, including the fact that many young women and children were burned in a crematorium simply because the Germans did not see them as fit enough to work. In Wiesel’s novel Night, Wiesel uses the motifs fear, silence, and optimism.
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.
Another instance of hope is displayed during one of the selections, during the selection of chapter five; Elie has to run as fast as he can to prove his worth to the Germans, after he is finished he is told he was not chosen for execution. “I began to laugh. I was happy. I felt like kissing him. At that moment the others did not matter! They had not written me down.”, (Wiesel, 72). The Nazis would hold examinations called ‘selections’. During the selections the Jewish prisoners had to run and show the Germans that they could still be of use. Elie begins to run, doubting his own strength and ability to carry on. Afterwards Elie finds out that he had not been marked down and will live to see another day. Elie is overwhelmed with joy and hope.
A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust.
The memoir, Night, demonstrates that there is good in having hope in the sense that it can make an ideal of surviving into more of a reality, therefore it is easier to prevail.There are many points throughout the text where the author, Elie Wiesel alludes to this. At one point Elie is describing the experience close to the start of the time in the concentration camp: “Our moral was much improved. A good night’s sleep had done its work. Friends met, exchanged a few sentences. We spoke of everything without ever mentioning those who had disappeared. The prevailing opinion was that the war was about to end.” (pg. 42) In this particular part of the memoir, the community around Elie is holding the ideal of the war coming to an end before it gravely
The unimaginable actions from German authorities in the concentration camps of the Holocaust were expected to be tolerated by weak prisoners like Wiesel or death was an alternate. These constant actions from the S.S. officers crushed the identification of who Wiesel really was. When Wiesel’s physical state left, so did his mental state. If a prisoner chose to have a mind of their own and did not follow the S.S. officer’s commands they were written brutally beaten or even in severe cases sentenced to their death. After Wiesel was liberated he looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t even recognize who he was anymore. No prisoner that was a part of the Holocaust could avoid inner and outer turmoil.
One wouldn’t expect faith, or the idea of it, to be as volatile as it was in chapter five of Night. This chapter highlighted two examples of losing faith in G-d, but while that loss left Elie Wiesel without the ability to believe in anything, it brought someone he described as a faceless neighbor to devote all his faith entirely to one man: Adolf Hitler.
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.
In conclusion, Wiesel loses his belief in God and religion by witnessing the murder of his people, and his family. Wiesel is symbolic of every survivor who experienced the dread of the Holocaust. Like most of the survivors, Wiesel wavered about religion and God, but completely lost it at the end of the Holocaust. For instance, my Great-Grandfather Ruben survived the Holocaust, but came out with a nonreligious way of life. In addition, it took Wiesel about ten years to write Night and he believes he has a moral obligation to, “try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (viii).
The best teachers have the capabilities to teach from first hand experience. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys his grueling childhood experiences of survival to an audience that would otherwise be left unknown to the full terrors of the Holocaust. Night discloses mental and physical torture of the concentration camps; this harsh treatment forced Elie to survive rather than live. His expert use of literary devices allowed Wiesel to grasp readers by the hand and theatrically display to what extent the stress of survival can change an individual’s morals. Through foreshadowing, symbolism, and repetition, Wiesel’s tale proves that the innate dark quality of survival can take over an individual.
In Night, by Elie Wiesel, there is an underlying theme of anger. Anger not directed where it seems most appropriate- at the Nazis- but rather a deeper, inbred anger directed towards God. Having once been a role model of everything a “good Jew” should be, Wiesel slowly transforms into a faithless human being. He cannot comprehend why the God who is supposed to love and care for His people would refuse to protect them from the Germans. This anger grows as Wiesel does and is a constant theme throughout the book.
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
In this tiny novel, you will get to walk right into a gruesome nightmare. If only then, it was just a dream. You would witness and feel for yourself of what it is like to go through the unforgettable journey that young Eliezer Wiesel and his father had endured in the greatest concentration camp that shook the history of the entire world. With only one voice, Eliezer Wiesel’s, this novel has been told no better. Elie's voice will have you emotionally torn apart. The story has me questioning my own wonders of how humanity could be mistreated in such great depths and with no help offered.
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.
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.