Literary Analysis: “Night” In Elie Wiesel’s autobiographical memoir “Night,” Elie expresses his disturbing yet truthful journey on how he along with many other Jews had to have the courage and tolerance to survive, despite the unlawful acts of discrimination. At the age of fifteen Elie was taken from his home in Sighet and endured countless hardships, cruelty, fear, and stress, due to his religion. With everything happening in his life he had to learn how to be strong mentally and physically as well as being tolerant to Hitler’s anti-Semitism wrath towards the Jewish people all around Europe. When the Nazis first started destroying the Jewish people’s lives, they used the yellow star to identify the Jews so that they wouldn’t “dishearten the others.” (cyberpear. 6) “The yellow star?
Jews were blind citied and didn’t realize how bad things were going to get that very few went into hiding during the war. The Jews that remained were forced into ghettos which equaled death. They were dying of infectious diseases, exposure to elements and starvation. The few that were strong n survived in the ghetto were forced to go to Central Square and deported to concentration camps. For the first time in many of these children’s lives, they were forced to confront the concept of what being a Jew meant to them and the society of which they lived.
Crammed tightly into train cars in the cold, without any food or water, the journey to the camp and demoralization of Levi and his fellow Jews began. Once they arrived at the camp the attempt to transformed Jews into beasts continued as the Jews were stripped of all their clothes and personal effects. The distrusting conditions of their bathroom facilities became a constant method to break the will of the prisoners to upkeep their personal hygiene. The machine left the bathroom in horrid conditions. “The washroom is far from attractive.
One place they were forbidden to be was schools. Jewish children, teenagers, and adults were ripped out of school, many never to return back. They were deprived of their education and soon after Jewish children were picked on and threatened, and beat on by other children. The young did not understand why and just did as they were told as more and more begun to change. Events like the Holocaust changed the lives of the survivors and the others who witness lives forever.
Piles of corpses, bones, and human ashes were found. Thousands of starving survivors that were and were not Jews were also found (“Aftermath”). Jewish survivors had no desire to return home. The anti-Semitism in the parts of Germany caused many Jews to not want to return home. The ones, who returned home, lived in fear.
Thesis: Often in times of cruelty and suffering, religion is used as guidance in order to survive. In Night, by Ellie Wiesel, as the Jews were making a transition from their normal lives, to entering the holocaust, many of the Jewish people disregarded religion and lost faith in god. Ellie Wiesel begins his story by describing one of his close friends, who went by the name of Moishe the Beadle. Wiesel and Moishe the Beadle are both very religious Jews. Ellie Would study Jewish prayers, Talmud, during the day, and at night he would run to the synagogue to cry about the destruction of the temple.
Elie struggles to find trust in God, for he feels his God has abandoned him, allowing his people to live in such pain. Eventually, Elie find that his faith has deteriorated, diminished from his resilient childhood beliefs. Although strongly religious before his journey in the Holocaust, Wiesel went through a dramatic deterioration of faith during the horrific events he experienced in Auschwitz, ultimately leading to his distant relationship with God by the end of the memoir. When he was only a young boy, Elie realized his calling in life was profess his faith in the study of Kabbalah, representing his strong connection with God. Determined to master his faith, Wiesel asks his father, “to find [him] a master who could guide [him] in the study of the Kabbalah” (4).
Which mentally destroyed there mind and soul by how poorly perceived they are as a human. As Elies remains longer in the concentration camps the germans do not stop the torturing events. Once Elie and His father have cut their hair they try to find people who they know. They get assigned a labor unit after which means they will not immediately get sent to the crematorium to death. A long night passes, Elie gets beaten again than sent in line while, the SS officers bring in three veteran prisoners to tattoo numbers on each individual "in the afternoon, they made us line up.
As they arrive in Birkenu, Wiesel and his father are separated from his mother and sisters; they never see them again. All Jews are evaluated to see whether they should be killed immediately or put to work in concentration camps. Elie and his father pass the evaluation and are taken to prisoner barracks where they first encounter open-pit furnaces where thousands of babies are being burned (p.32). They are, before long, stripped from all clothing, shaved, disinfected, and treated with inhumane cruelty. They soon make their way to Buna, a work camp, where they are put to work as slaves and under much malnourishment.
Captain Amacher of the 101st airborne division said that the prisoners, "looked confused, as if they no longer understood life outside the walls. "(Amacher) many of the survivors had been living in this awful place for more than a year barely surviving and trying their hardest simply not to break down. The toll of this place on their minds had been immense and left a lasting impact. Following the state of shock after the capture, the men devolved into a state of rage. After rounding up the remaining SS guards, the U.S. forces lined them up and executed them with extreme prejudice.