Night By Elie Wiesel Research Paper

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Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, is about the author’s year spent in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. The first part of the book is about how the author, Elie Wiesel, is taken to Auschwitz, where he spends most of his time working and caring for his father. Later on, when Russian troops come to liberate the camp, the prisoners are taken on a death march to another camp (Buchenwald). This is where Elie stays until he is liberated by American troops. The story shows many symbols throughout, but Wiesel especially uses the yellow star armband and the tattooed numbers to create a theme of loss of individual identity. Before Elie was taken to Auschwitz, Jews in his community had to wear armbands with a yellow star of David on them to mark them as …show more content…

It’s not lethal.’”. Wiesel then writes, “Poor Father! Of what then did you die?”(11). The stars themselves announce to everyone that a person is Jewish, which leads to more blind hatred. When combined with Hitler’s anti-Semitic propaganda, the bands led to more violence against Jews. The bands made non-Jewish people stop seeing them as individual beings and turned them into a mass below everyone else, a mass to be hated. The way Elie reflects by saying “Of what did you die?” adds to this, because those are Elie's thoughts when reflecting on the events. The future shows that what started as simply identifying someone as a Jew escalated into mass killing. When people stopped seeing being Jewish as one fragment of a whole identity, and saw it as the defining factor of a person, one of the first events leading up to the suffering later on. Another symbol early on in the story is the number that Elie is assigned. The number is also tattooed onto him as his name for the rest of his time in camp. In the book, after Elie is tattooed, he says that he “became A-7713” and that “from then on, [he] had no other name”(42). Being called by a number takes away their individuality as well as their

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