Night And The Book Thief: Movie Analysis

Elie and Liesel live and survive during the time of World War II. Both characters face the harsh reality of the terrible period of time they are living in. The memoir, Night and the movie, “The Book Thief” share similarities and dissimilarities that make Elie and Liesel both stand out. Due to the loss of family, determination to live, and fear helps both of them survive the war, but depends on the different reactions, mistreated for different reasons, and hope.
Elie and Liesel have the motivation to keep moving forward to overcome their obstacles which are the way how Hitler was controlling people. Elie in the memoir, Night and Liesel in “The Book Thief” both encounters the agony of losing their loved ones. “I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever” (Wiesel 29). Elie loses his mother and sisters when they were being transported to different concentration camps. This is also the last time Elie gets to ever see them again. Later in the novel, Elie loses his father to dysentery. “If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care only of myself” (Wiesel 106). As a result of the death of his father, Elie was finally able to look out for himself. Similarity, Liesel loses her parents due to them being communists and her brother. Death came to pick up the little soul of Liesel’s brother. Even though they endure the same struggle of losing their loved ones, their reactions are different from one another. Elie

and Liesel eventually lose their fathers, but Elie seems to be relieved when his father dies. A huge weight of responsibility that was on Elie's back disappears. “Free at last!...” (Wiesel 112). When the bombs blow up Himmel Street, Liesel loses her foster father, Hans. When Liesel sees her motionless father, she has a completely different reaction in comparison to Elie. Liesel comes up to Hans’ corpse bawling her eyes out while rubbing his head as if she’s telling him good night. The expression on her face shows great pain and sorrow. When thinking about the word war, the word death also comes to mind.
The obstacles help Elie and Liesel overcome their fear of dying. During World War II, Elie would be mistreated for being a Jew while Liesel would be mistreated for helping out a Jew. In the concentration camps, Elie and his father face many punishments. Hitler aside with his evil henchmen force the Jews heavy labor that would help Germany win the war. “And that was how I was assigned to a forced labor unit” (Wiesel 54). Throughout the movie, Liesel, and her foster parents help a Jew who is named Max to hide from the Nazis. There also is a mean boy in the movie becoming suspicious about Liesel so, he would bully her and her best friend, Rudy. Because they have to deal with tough times, Elie and Liesel also show a form of self-determination. Since World War II means a complex and painful life to Jews, Elie becomes very determined to find a way to survive the concentration camps. He fights for his life to overcome the hard challenges in the camps. “I was hungry and thirsty. I must have been very dirty and disheveled, to judge by what the others looked like”(Wiesel 95). Liesel also shows her self-determination when she was trying her best to hide Max, and keeping him safe. Saving Max’s life also came with a consequence of risking Liesel and her foster parents in danger. Eventually, fear gets to Hans which makes him force Max to leave. Liesel and her foster parents no longer have to stress about the Nazis finding out about their secret. Fear also gets to Elie and his father.“My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent”(Wiesel 39). Elie is so petrified that he cannot do anything to help his father because he’s afraid what the men might do to him. There would be times Elie has no more hope in the world as if he has given up. Elie would be waiting for death to come to obtain his soul. “We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die…”(Wiesel 87). On the other hand, Liesel finds hope after the war ends. She is reunited with another family of her own. After the deaths of everyone she loved, she goes on living her life and having a husband and three children.
Elie from Night and Liesel from “The Book Thief” both share various similarities and differences such as losing family members, having self-determination, and fear; as well as having different feelings, different victimization, and hope.

Going through these events, Elie Wiesel and Liesel Meminger manage to survive this ruthless war. Each viewpoint makes them look back in life, seeing how much they have accomplished as

individuals.