Do you understand?” Such cruelty was common in the camps however; it was often the only means of surviving amidst the SS and other Nazis. The last encounter that Eliezer has with this kind of brutality is on the train to Buchenwald. A fight breaks out on the train among the prisoners, as onlookers and German citizens find amusement at throwing pieces of bread onto the train for the Jews to fight over. Eliezer sees an older man crawl out of the fighting, clutching a piece of bread. As he makes his way, crawling, to the rear of the train, his son jumps on top of him, bludgeoning his father to death in order to take the bread.
Crammed in a train and on their way to concentration camp, Elie and his father are witnessing the cries and screams of “fire” by Madame Schacter, however each time they look to see the fire it is not there. …”soon we were all asleep. Suddenly: ‘The fire! The furnace! Look, over there!’” (Weisel 25).
When he is struck with dysentery, Elie begins to lose hope in life for his father. His father begins to go mad as the men in the bunks around him steal his food and beat him during the night. One night during orders Eliezer’s father begins to scream Elie’s name and beg for water until an SS officer kills him with a truncheon. He is carried away to the crematory before Elie wakes the next morning. Elie does not cry, because he is relieved by his father’s death.
What was there to thank Him for?”(33). Once he witnesses the awful things that are happening at the camp to the Jewish people, he begins to question his religion; the author wonders why his God would allow something so terrible happen to his followers. In the novel he describes the time spent in the camp as a time without God. In the bible, when God is creating the earth, His first action is to make light to banish the darkness; meaning that darkness refers to life with no God. Wiesel uses the night as a symbol throughout his work to depict that his time at the camp was one long night; a night without his God.
The Boycott of Jewish Shops (1933) The boycott took place on April 1st 1933; it began at 10am and only lasted for a day. During this day yellow and black stars (the Star of David) were painted across thousands of doors and windows to highlight that there was a Jew there. Brown shirts (SA men) also stood at entrances to various places of Jewish business and encouraged people not to go into them. Many of them help posters and signs (like the one to the left) saying something like ‘Germans defend yourselves against the Jewish, buy only at German shops’. However a lot of German people ignored these signs as they liked shopping in Jewish shops as they liked the bargains.
Of those survivors one in particular touched nations with their recount of the horrific events. Night, written by Elie Wiesel is the document of a young boy forced to become a man inside a German concentration camp. During Wiesel’s time in Auschwitz he weighed on by the responsibility of growing up almost overnight. Arriving in Auschwitz at age fifteen Elie Wiesel was nobody’s image of a man in society. Coming from a humble town in Hungary, Wiesel and his community were force on to cattle cars and shipped off to work.
The Importance of Father- Son Bonds The memoir, Night, written by Elie Wiesel tells a young man’s account of the brutal and cruelest event in history, the Holocaust. He explains his struggle with his faith during his time in the concentration camp. Losing his father, experiencing death of others, he begins to lose faith in God, only remaining the faith he has for his father; that eventually leads to his survival. At the beginning of the novel, Elie’s and God's relationship was inseparable, he was very religious. Elie wanted nothing more to learn the Cabbala, and was very serious with his studies.
Inside the concentration camps, people were being killed hysterically, most of them Jews. As Jews watch people being killed, being human beings, their minds fill with fear. They begin to search for family members, friends, or perhaps even anyone to give them companionship. For example, in the novel “Night”, Ellie writes that when he arrived at the camp, he held his father’s hand. This simple act of just holding his father’s hand implies that he is searching for some kind of relief.
In the book, Elie mentions a boy who is caught trying to steal bread. The Nazi’s feel they must make an example of him, because that kind of behavior could not be tolerated. So they made a spectacle of him, and called the entire camp out to watch him be hung. The boy struggled for thirty minutes as the jews had to watch, helplessly. That was the last straw for Elie.
1/29/13 The Journey of Horrifying Nights In the past couple of weeks, as a class we have been reading and discussing the book Night written by, Elie Wiesel. It’s a nonfictional book, based on a real life story about, a young boy’s journey through the holocaust and how he survived. The significance of reading this book is that, younger generations need to read real life stories like this, so that they can learn the mistakes people made in the past and learn to correct or to prevent anything like the Holocaust from happening ever again. As humans, we all make mistakes and to prevent ourselves from doing and repeating mistakes, we should read and understand history so that we can figure out what went wrong and teach it to teach it to others so that they won’t also repeat the mistake in the future. In this book Elie Wiesel uses the figurative languages of Simile, Imagery, and Metaphor to enhance the reader’s experience while reading the book.