Reflection For Night By Elie Wiesel

Night by Elie Wiesel is a horrific and brutal account of the sufferings of a concentration camp prisoner in the time of the Holocaust. Although based on Mr Wiesel’s own experience, he tells it from the viewpoint of a young, fictional character named Eliezer. It is a slight alteration of what actually occurred to the author and his father during the Holocaust and his imprisonment in the Nazi German concentration camps as a Jew. The themes throughout the book are very dark hence the title Night. The events that Mr. Weisel recounts throughout this book bring faith into question along with the larceny of one’s identity during this time.
The time of the Holocaust and World War II are especially significant to my family’s legacy. This personal connection to the subject drew me to this book through a tie with my paternal grandmother. She

lived in Germany during the time of the Holocaust, and she experienced the fear through the perception of a young girl who couldn’t grasp the complexity of what was occurring. Also in this time, my grandfather was serving in World War II and would meet this woman who would become my grandmother. She followed him back to the United States to begin a new cultural experience.
I have heard my grandmother recall the horrors that she experienced which are still vivid in her mind 70 years later. She never questioned her faith through this time, and instead used it to get her through. Mr. Weisel proved when he wrote this book years after his experience that these kinds of memories never go away. This is seen throughout the book. In the beginning, he clearly recalls the day his family was removed from their home and transported to the ghettos to await deportation. This goes to show the power of memory when one lives through trauma and how those memories become a part of one’s identity.
As I mentioned, identity is a theme that is uncovered from the beginning. In the first few pages, one discovers that Eliezer identifies himself as a Jew who is delving more into what this means by studying the Talmud. As time goes on, the rise of Adolf Hitler comes to light among the people of Sighet. Among numerous freedom restrictions, they are all forced to wear a yellow star which commences their loss of individual identity.
Later in the book when Eliezer arrives at Auschwitz, he claims to be a farmer so that he can avoid separation from his father.

In reality, he’s an innocent, young student who is about to mature to great lengths through his experience and survival. In the camp, all prisoners wear the same garb and are identified by numbers. They are no longer individuals. Taking away their names and their freedom also takes away their humanity, and they act in self-deceit in order to survive. There’s a lack of moral code that the prisoners must now come to identify with. Eventually, many die and are carelessly and thoughtlessly buried or burned without a chance to be memorialized. When this atrocity ends, the survivors take on a new part of their identity along with those who are mourned. Either way, they are forever a victim of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is proof of this because it is through his story of survival that he is so widely known and respected. In the bigger picture of things, the Holocaust is part of this planet’s identity and that is shown by the fact that we are still studying it in class today on a continent apart from where it

occurred.
Another theme that I uncovered while reading Mr. Wiesel’s tale was the struggle to maintain his faith. In the book, Eliezer is a believer in the Jewish faith. He has an unconditional belief that God is everywhere and that God made the world good, but the horrors that he witnesses at the concentration camp challenge these feelings. He wonders how God could ignore the suffering of the Jews if God is thought to be loving. For example, his first night in Birkenau gives way to the experience of infants being tossed into a flaming pit. Later that night, his father prays, but Eliezer refuses to do the same. His absence of faith allows him to consider killing himself. After all, God couldn’t save the innocent babies from the flaming pit, so why should Eliezer have hope that he is more worthy of life?
In class, we covered Hitler’s rise to power in Nazi Germany in 1933 through his establishment of the National Socialist Party. It was discussed how he used a fake version of Darwinism to justify his extreme racism against Jews, nonwhite, capitalists, communists and many others. He gathered followers of all kinds who believed in the elite Aryan master race. Ring-winged followers were close to big business while left-winged followers were close with labor unions. He was also attracted to those who did not fit with normal society. He allowed for the construction of concentration camps such as Auschwitz where Eliezer and his father were brutally treated. The end results amounted to mass genocide with the “Final Solution” where over 6 million Jews and many others including homosexuals, blacks and gypsies were heinously murdered.
This book of 115 pages was published in its translated form by Hill and Wang with a copyright of 2006. No further sources are listed, as this is a historically accurate account derived from direct experience. Mr. Weisel leaves nothing to the mind. His quality of storytelling is open and honest with powerful and detailed insights to a catastrophic event in human history.