Fight or Flight? In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Elie faces danger and overcomes challenges throughout his whole experience in Auschwitz. Human beings dominated by fear respond with fight or flight. Fight is attacking or facing while flight is running away or escaping a fear. Before Elie even reaches Auschwitz, he is overcome with fear. While Elie is on a train unknowingly going to Auschwitz, a lady screams and acts excessively dangerously. Hallucinating, she envisions a fire and warns everyone else of terrifying things to come. A group of men are frightened by her outburst, and quickly decide to beat her until she could not make another noise. She makes everyone more afraid than they already are, causing them to break down and panic: “It …show more content…
took us a long time to recover from this harsh awakening...Unable to still our anguish, we tried to reassure each other” ( Wiesel 25). The guys on the cattle car have fear and their quick reaction is to fight their fear. As she is causing more fear and panic, the only thing they can do is beat her so she will be quiet.
It is the only thing they can do to make people calm and less afraid of what is going to happen. She causes a great commotion, making a lot of people angry. As they arrive at Auschwitz a few days later, fear is brought upon Elie once again. Elie waits in line to take a shower and get his head shaved, he notices that babies were being thrown in the air and used as target practice. He and many others think they too are walking to their death at that moment. He is not going to the crematorium but he thinks he is. That is where the human reaction of flight can come into action. Elie thinks about jumping into a barbed wire fence just to escape everything, he wants to run away and not be afraid. Elie tries to convince himself, “I gathered all that remained of my strength in order to break rank and throw myself onto the barbed wire” (34). This shows flight, as he is trying to escape the fear. The fear makes this reaction of flight run through his mind. During the reaction of fight or flight, it can lead a person to act erratically. Thinking about jumping into barbed wire just to escape everything is definitely the fear reaction of flight. The natural reaction of fear is still alive in today's world, it is shown
when a cop pulls someone over. The person will have fear of what can happen. There is so much going through there mind, they will react in the fight or flight. They could run away or try to escape the cops, or they could get out and try to harm the cop. These reactions, alive during the Holocaust, still exist today when fear is exposed.
As a son watches his mother take her last breath on her deathbed, an overwhelming grief sets in. Although knowing that his mom smokes and drinks, he never told her to quit or ease up because he thought his mother can never die. In this case, the offset of this denial is his mom’s early death but, the denial by the Jews during 1942, caused a far more superior calamity, six million deaths! Alas, just like the boy who lost his mother, the Jews have signs and warnings to escape the invasion and Elie Wiesel does a superb job of incorporating that in his book, Night. These overlooked chances, or motifs, are Moshe not getting the respect for his word, uncomprehending the news that is given to the Jews, and the misjudgment of how evil a man Hitler is.
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
Wiesel uses the motif fear to develop characters. He uses this motif to show how the other Jews in the camp felt. Elie’s father tells him that he cannot sleep, since sleep means death. “Don’t let yourself be overcome by sleep, Eliezer. It’s dangerous to fall asleep in snow.
14. Was the theme implicit or explicit? Explain. I would say that the theme is implicit because the author never really comes out and says it, but rather it is hinted. The last chapter of part three is a more obvious way of saying the theme is guilt, but the author does not say it and so the reader has to infer. When Hannah commits suicide, it was most likely because she could not live with the guilt of what she had been apart of. When she tells Michael she has learned how to read, we can infer she was referring to how she had now read everything that had gone on during the Holocaust.
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, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp, Elie experiences numerous events that challenge his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore.
How can inhumanity be used to make one suffer? The book Night by Elie Wiesel is about a young Jewish boy named Elie who struggles to survive in Auschwitz, a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Throughout the memoir, there are many instances where inhumanity is portrayed. The theme seen in this novel is inhumanity through discrimination, fear, and survival. Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy, lived in Sighet during World War II with his mother, father, and two sisters, and he is very religious and wanted to study Judaism.
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.
Is it possible to lose awareness in the face of chaos not only of the situation itself but also of the other people involved, as well as of oneself? Despite the complexity of this question, it appears to be thoroughly answered in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. As a matter of fact, the author and his fellow Jews remain unsuspecting of the warnings that unfold throughout the novel. Moreover, it is only until Wiesel is exposed to the malevolence of the Holocaust that he is finally able to fathom that everything has lost significance, except for “the word chimney” which Elie perceives as “the only word that had real meaning in” the Auschwitz concentration camp (Wiesel 39). Beyond the literal meaning, this metaphor reveals that the Holocaust causes Elie and his fellow Jews to become insensitive to the pain of those around them, and to lose sight of who they once were.
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.
Mr. Wiesel had intended this book to describe a period of time in his life that had been dark and sorrowful. This novel is based on a survivor of the greatest Holocaust in history, Eliezer Wiesel and his journey of being a Jew in 1944. The journey had started in Sighet, Transylvania, where Elie spent his childhood. During the Second World War, Germans came to Elie and his family’s home town. They brought with them unnecessary evil and despair to mankind. Shortly after young Elie and thousands of other Jews were forced from their habitats and torn from their rights of being human. They were sent to different concentration camps. Elie and his family were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp. It would be the last time Elie sees his mother and little sister, Tzipora. The first sights of Auschwitz were terrifying. There were big flames coming from the burning of bodies and the crematoriums. The Jews had no idea of what to expect. They were not told what was about to happen to them. During the concentration camp, there was endless death and torture. The Jews were starved and were treated worse than cattle. The prisoners began to question their faith in God, wondering why God himself would
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.
Fear can affect people in ways they never thought possible. Sometimes, they lose sight of who they once were and become a whole new person. The various experiences Elie faced in the concentration camps affected his whole world. Elie, a devoted Jewish believer, lost faith in God after realizing that he cannot have faith in a God who tolerates inhumanity such as he went through. Self-sufficiency was encouraged throughout the concentration camps, therefore Elie was forced to grow up and leave his innocence behind. Because of this self-reliance, many started to view their friends and family as a burden rather than a motivation. All in all, one can say that fear is the root of many catastrophes in the world today.
In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie goes through many changes, as a character, while he was in Auschwitz. Before Elie was sent to Auschwitz, he was just a small child that new little of the world. He made poor decisions and questioned everything. Elie was a religious boy before he
...e has to deal with the death of his family, the death of his innocence, and the death of his God at the very young age of fifteen. He retells the horrors of the concentration camp, of starvation, beatings, torture, illness, and hard labor. He comes to question how God could let this happen and to redefine the existence of God in the concentration camp. This book is also filled with acts of kindness and compassion amid the degradation and violence. It seems that for every act of violence that is committed, Elie counteracts with some act of compassion. Night is a reflection on goodness and evil, on responsibility to family and community, on the struggle to forge identity and to maintain faith. It shows one boy's transformation from spiritual idealism to spiritual death via his journey through the Nazi's failed attempt to conquer and erase a people and their faith.