Literature comes in various forms, genres, and has very different stories. These stories can be either very distant, or connected through experiences, themes, and setting. In two very different stories the reader can relate the two books through the setting. In Night by Elie Wiesel and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak a reader is able to connect the two books through the time and setting. By reading these books a reader is able to view two opposite perspectives during the time of the Holocaust, and using these perspectives is able to connect the feelings of both those on the inside and outside of the camps to understand how people suffered and lost faith in humanity.
The Book Thief is an example of living outside of the concentration camps. In Nazi Germany, the story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger, is told through the eyes of “Death”. Liesel was unaware of what was occurring during the time, she only knew as much as she had read in books. The Book Thief started with the idea of suffering. The reader is directly introduced to the suffering through hunger, loss of family, and
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emotions. Liesel, from the start of the book, suffers from the loss of her brother. “Still in disbelief, she started to dig. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't be dead. He couldn't”, Liesel’s loss of her brother affected the reader through her disbelief. Through denial Liesel would continue to suffer more through the thoughts of her brother. This affects the reader and pulls them to feel sympathy for Liesel, even though, at the time, she was getting along quite well. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel the life inside of a concentration camp is described.
Every minute of everyday in the camps is described fully. Elie and his family had been admitted into the camp, and separated. Elie and his father stayed together, however watched each other suffer. Elie could not stand to see his father is such a horrible condition, causing him to feel guilt. Along with this emotional suffering, those in camps were living a life of misery, each day working, getting little to no sleep, and eating close to nothing. This form of suffering gives the reader an idea of the intense situations inside the camps. Again, the reader feels sympathetic towards the characters, however a completely different reason. The connection can be made that two opposite characters both suffered either mentally or physically, and this is by the work of the author(s) portraying the
conditions. The misery that had gone on during the Holocaust was bound to have an effect on everyone. Those inside and outside of the camps began to lose all faith in God and humanity. Throughout Night by Elie Wiesel he states that he began to lose faith in god during his experiences. In many quotations this idea of lost faith is explained. “‘Where is merciful God, where is He? Someone behind me was asking”, this quotation describes the thoughts of those inside the camps, they began to question the idea of the god as they are suffering and no one had acted to stop it. Elie throughout his experience lost all faith, ““For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”, this quotation is an example of his rage, and the thought process of most in the camps. The Book Thief contains a different kind of lost faith. Over the span of the book Liesel became frustrated with humanity. This frustration led to lost faith and hope. Liesel grew as a character, and through this she learned more. She was introduced to books and soon became aware of the world. This opened her up to Hitler’s cruel ways, mainly propaganda. Liesel was more aware and became frustrated over the fact that people were not affected. Not everyone, but most, had fallen to the propaganda and let the cruelty continue. Liesel lost her faith in humanity not because people were cruel, but because they had been brainwashed and supported the cruel actions. By reading both The Book Thief and Night a reader is able to connect and understand what had occurred during the time of the holocaust. Through this the feelings and thoughts during the time are understood and the reader is able to understand how complex and dark the time was for everyone. Works Cited
Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief depicts the life of a certain young German girl named Liesel Meminger during World War II. Her story was told through the eyes of Death, who narrates both the blessings and devastation that occurred during that era. Liesel experiences living with her new foster parents and come across a boy named Rudy Steider who will later on become her best friend. As the story unfolds, Liesel gradually discovers the horrifying truth behind the Nazi regime as her foster parents take refuge of a Jewish man. Despite being in the midst of destruction and recently coping from her traumatic background, she undertakes on a journey of self-discovery and
In Markus Zusak’s novel, the book thief, Liesel Meminger is surrounded by death and fear as that is the norm in the 1930’s. Liesel is a strong young girl who has been deeply affected by her brother’s death and her mother leaving her and finds comfort in ‘The Grave Digger’s Handbook’, the book she stole at the site of her brother’s burial. Throughout the novel Liesel finds comfort in other books and reads them to escape the terrible reality that is Nazi Germany. Together with books she overcomes obstacles she wouldn't have been able to do without them
“What do you expect? That’s war…” Elie Wiesel, young teenage boy sent to work in a concentration camp with his family near the end of WW2. Author of his own autobiography, Night recounting his struggles during that time. This book is about a boy named Elie Wiesel who was captured by the Nazi’s and was put into a concentration camp, and got disconnected from God, and was very close to his mom, dad, and family. Throughout Night Elie Wiesel addresses the topic of genocide through the use of imagery, simile, and personification.
A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust.
At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.
In the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak the narrator is Death, who shows itself as sympathetic and sensitive towards the suffering of the world and the cruel human nature, through its eyes, we can get to know the heartbreaking story of Liesel Meminger an ordinary, but very lucky nine-year old German girl; living in the midst of World War II in Germany. In this book the author provides a different insight and observation about humanity during this time period from a German view and not an Allied perspective, as we are used to.
In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Liesel Meminger, an orphaned little girl living in Nazi Germany, evolves partly through her numerous literary thefts. At her younger brother’s gravesite, she steals her first book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, which teaches her not only the method to physically bury her brother, but also lets her emotionally bury him and move on. The theft of her next book, The Shoulder Shrug, from a book burning marks the start of Liesel’s awareness and resistance to the Nazi regime. As a story with a Jewish protagonist “who [is] tired of letting life pass him by – what he refer[s] to as the shrugging of the shoulders to the problems and pleasures of a person’s time on earth,” this novel prepares her both for resisting the
The book Night by Elie Wiesel, tells the story of a boy and his father’s experiences in concentration camps during the Holocaust in its final year from 1944 to 1945. The author recounts his story while sharing his thoughts, regrets, and some events from before and after being put into the concentration camps. Through Elie Wiesel’s story, he shares his belief that everyone should be an upstander through his use of symbolism.
The chaos and destruction that the Nazi’s are causing are not changing the lives of only Jews, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Between Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are crucial to the survival of principle characters. Ironically, in both stories there is a foreseen future, that both seemed to be ignored.
The best teachers have the capabilities to teach from first hand experience. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys his grueling childhood experiences of survival to an audience that would otherwise be left unknown to the full terrors of the Holocaust. Night discloses mental and physical torture of the concentration camps; this harsh treatment forced Elie to survive rather than live. His expert use of literary devices allowed Wiesel to grasp readers by the hand and theatrically display to what extent the stress of survival can change an individual’s morals. Through foreshadowing, symbolism, and repetition, Wiesel’s tale proves that the innate dark quality of survival can take over an individual.
Both the book, Night, by Elie Wiesel and the graphic novels, Maus I, II, by Art Spiegelman depict the Holocaust. In Night, the scenes of the Holocaust are depicted through words and in Maus I, II they are depicted through illustration. They both display the powerful message of the Holocaust, but in two different forms. In each book, the media that is used helps define the story that is being told. Both medias are strong because they are able to tell the story of the Holocaust, but sometimes the message is more noticeable or powerful when used in a different form. Each story is able to emphasize different points through the use of different types of imagery.
Some of the most fabled stories of our time come from individuals overcoming impossible odds and surviving horrific situations. This is prevalent throughout the Holocaust. People are fascinated with this event in history because the survivors had to overcome immense odds. One, of many, of the more famous stories about the Holocaust is Night by Elie Wiesel. Through this medium, Wiesel still manages to capture the horrors of the camps, despite the reader already knowing the story.
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
Words hold great power and when used correctly can influence what people believe and how they act.
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed…“(Wiesel 32) Livia-Bitton Jackson wrote a novel based on her personal experience, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Elli was a Holocaust victim and her only companion was her mother. Together they fought for hunger, mistreatment and more. By examining the themes carefully, the audience could comprehend how the author had a purpose when she wrote this novel. In addition, by seeing each theme, the audience could see what the author was attacking, and why. By illustrating a sense of the plight of millions of Holocaust victims, Livia-Bitton Jackson explores the powerful themes of one’s will to survive, faith, and racism.