The Reality Of Elie Wiesel's Night

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The Reality of “Night” The reality of Jewish existence during the Holocaust is documented through the personal accounts of Elie Wiesel in his book, “Night”. Though his story is unfathomable and at times even unbearable, it continues to help millions walk a mile in Elie’s shoes. Because this memoir is written in first-person and reads like a autobiography we are able to relate to the authors perceptions and pain. Throughout the memoir, Elie is told numerous stories that he then associates with his own reality. The extermination of millions was a result of a one country’s government wanting to severely disrupt and dismantle thousands of years of tradition. The Nazi party sought to wipe out the cultural, religious and national unity…show more content…
The real struggle within the barbed wire walls of concentration camps was surviving. The books title “Night” is symbolic to the hopelessness and emptiness felt by millions throughout the Holocaust. The Jewish faith recognizes that God created a luminous world, where light shines to remind us to keep hope and faith. The holocaust was a hellish time where even Elie himself admittedly questioned God’s existence, he cannot understand why he would let so many people suffer at the hands of such cruelty. To him, a world without light represented a world without God’s presence. In his memoir, night falls during several horrific events. The first mention of night is when Elie’s father’s story is interrupted by mention of the deportation of Jews, then upon their arrival at Auschwitz it is also night. In just one night, Elie’s first night at the camp, he had already encountered so much pain, fear, and terror. The following quote is, in my opinon, is the most impactful reflection of night in the reading, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my…show more content…
The prisoners that inhabited Auschwitz all shared a situation, but did not come together because of it, instead they found themselves drift apart. Prisoners turned on other prisoners because self-preservation defeated any prior humanitarian practices. A select few of the preferred prisoners were chosen to monitor groups of other prisoners, and in return they would receive preferential treatment. These prisoners abandoned all personal beliefs and served under the demonic agenda of the S.S, they were then considered “beneficiaries of death”. The entire camp’s population was trapped and devoid of all things human, these conditions transformed people into barbarians fighting to just leave another day. Elie reflects on the change in his own behavior after his father is beat by another prisoner, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?” (Night, pg.39, lines 23-26) Elie did not have the mental or physical strength to retaliate on his father’s behalf. In comparison to the traumatic and murderous events Elie had already experienced in the camps, a fistfight now seemed so mundane. Before his arrival to Auschwitz, Elie had heard of evil but when he experienced it himself it was

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