Losing Humanity

“Stop,” I whimpered, desperate to get the S.S. officer to quit hitting me. But the blows kept coming, one after the other, like a drum afraid to get off beat, sending jolts of pain through my body. In that very moment, when the bows did not stop, I lost all faith in God and all of the humanity I had left. I sprung awake, in bed, sweating, realizing that these were only mere thoughts, thoughts provoked by Elie Wiesel who experienced these feelings first hand. In his novel Night, he thematically shows throughout that, humanity means to have a soul; the way to lose one’s soul is through pain, suffering, and loss of faith.

Pain, indescribable pain, that’s what he felt. After Elie accidentally stumbled across his Kapo, Idek, doing something he wasn’t supposed to, Elie was sentenced to be whipped twenty-five times. As he lay across the crate all he felt were the lashes of the whip. “I had not realized it, but I had fainted” (58) he said. There are many ways in which one can faint, but to faint through pain, must mean the pain was too great for one’s conscience mind to even fathom. During the Winter, with snow on the ground, Elie and his father made the life or death decision to leave the camp. As he walked from the infirmary to his block he reopened his healing wound. He then was advised to get some rest but could not sleep because of the injury. “My foot was on fire” (83) he stated. The previous statement made by Elie is a figure of speech. By this statement he means that his foot hurt so bad that it felt like it was burning. It’s easy to imagine the burning one feels when reopening a healing wound, no matter the size. These few examples of pain he experienced were nothing compared to the suffering soon to follow.

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...est fire. A careless or wrongly, placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on reputation, send the whole world up in smoke, and go up in smoke with it” (James 3:5-6). This quote makes one wonder why everyone listened and believed Hitler’s words. His speech drained the humanity of the Jews in those camps, and that one wrongly placed word left a bad mark on Germany. He tried to destroy the humanity of others through pain and suffering. The real question is why didn’t anyone ignore his words, why didn’t anyone stop him, from ruining others’ faith and souls.

Works Cited

Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a Division of Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 2006. Print.

The Quest Study Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994. Print.