In the story night Elie Wiesel's loss of faith throughout the book showed how the holocaust was a time of loneliness among every Jewish prisoner. Jews were all held against their will and witnessed the killing of innocent people just because the Nazi party thought they weren’t “human”. Elie and many other Jews began to lose their faith in humanity and the thought of survival when they were deported and taken from their home lives. Elie was transported to Auschwitz and had the idea that God was uncaring for letting all of this happen to him. Jewish prisoners all witnessed the burning of innocent children first hand, they hadn’t done anything yet they were being thrown into fire pits in bunches. This act from the Nazis showed the sheer power they had over everyone. They were now starting to realize they had nothing they …show more content…
“The days were like nights, and the nights left dregs of their darkness in our souls.” (Wiesel, pg. 100). When he says this he is comparing the nights of darkness to everyone's souls at this time. Fire and the burnings of Jewish people just because they were Jewish was showing the Nazis cruel power they had over everyone in their pathway. The smoke of the cremations from the chimneys were the image of death and helplessness in the story. Everything that was being symbolized was comparing the Nazi party and what they were doing to the rest of the world, primarily the Jewish culture. “In front of us, those flames. It must have been around midnight.” (Wiesel, pg. 28). This was to show and give us an image of what the concentration camp had looked like when Elie had arrived. The hard gusts of freezing winds and the constant burning sensation of being bitter cold was a feeling common among every Jew in those concentration
Through Wiesel’s choice of metaphors, he is revealing how careless and cruel the SS officers are towards all the Jews to lose faith. For example, when the prisoners first arrived at Auschwitz, “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies!”
He describes how he felt as if he had entered a world where all light and hope had been extinguished, where there was no longer any goodness or compassion left in the world. The darkness represents the loss of innocence and the destruction of everything that Wiesel held dear, including his family, his faith, and his humanity." 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." (Chapter 3) - This quote highlights the book's title in the first chapter, emphasizing how the experiences at the concentration camp turned Wiesel's life into a never-ending
The story of Night, by Elie Wiesel, shows the struggles that the Jews had. One might say the Holocaust strengthened the Jews’ faith. Throughout the story there has been situations where one can say that this is true. Night also shows that the Jews have came together to resolve their problems. The holocaust weakened the Jews’ faith in God.
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, there are many hardships that caused the characters to lose faith in their religion. Night is a 1960 memoir based on Weisel's Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944 -1945 toward the end of the Second World War in Europe. In the novel many prisoners struggle with their faith. “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my god and my soul and turned my drams to dust.”
Night by Elie Wiesel explains that inhumanity leads to hopelessness and mental scars, as represented by the symbol of fire, which depicts Nazi cruelty as well as the cruelty of the Crematory and the death marches. The flame sign represents the Nazis' heinous brutality to Jews. Fire is used to represent Jewish people's death and destruction. The flames appear several times throughout the novel, although Elie first saw them in the cremation.
Brandon Smidl Ms. Cavaliere English 10 5 January 2023 Loss of Faith by Witnessing Human Suffering A story named “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel confronts the topic of losing faith through human suffering by relating it to personal experiences during the Holocaust. The main character, Elie (Eliezer), talks about his experiences going through the countless Nazi-run concentration camps that were meant to conflict pain and suffering upon the Jewish people. Due to the atrocities that the Jewish prisoners faced every day many of them lost their faith in God and questioned their faith and belief in a higher power. During the time of the holocaust, many Jewish prisoners were sent to what
Religion has always been controversial, throughout history there have been hundreds of wars fought over religion. World War II may not have been solely based off of religion, but it had a major part in the war. During World War II Jews and other ethnic groups throughout Europe were harshly persecuted by Nazi Germany. Elie Wiesel, a Hungarian Jew and holocaust survivor recount the tragedy, he endured during the holocaust in his memoir, Night. With only 109 pages, Wiesel manages to write about almost every horror he faced, one of the worst being his loss of faith.
Eliezer Wiesel was a fifteen-year-old boy deported to the Nazi concentration camps in Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-1945 along with the Jews from his hometown in Sighet. He demonstrates the personal struggles to maintain faith along with the struggle of silence, all of which are presented through the theme of Night by Elie Wiesel. His character develops a loss of innocence as he encounters inhumanity and the death of his father. Elie was a believer in God and learned the secrets of Jewish mysticism with the help of Moishe the Beadle before being sent out to the concentration camps. As he maintained his survival, he lost his faith in God.
In the book “Night,” by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel’s main purpose of writing this book was to explain his experience at the Holocaust as a survivor. By stating how he endured the trauma occurring to him and around him, he is trying to voice out the sadistic cruelty of the Nazi’s and is speaking against the Jewish people who knew about the torment and pain people were enduring during the Holocaust yet did nothing to help. Another main reason of why Wiesel wrote “Night” was that he aimed at never letting people forget about what happened at the Holocaust and the brutal killings and treatment of innocent people. The main theme of “Night” is faith; Eliezer had a strong faith in goodness, divinity, and an almighty God who had put much goodness in the world. His faith shakened with all the horrible torment he faced in the concentration camps, he could not believe that such a
In the novel, “Night” written by Elie Wiesel, Elie shares his most personal memories of the Holocaust, which he experienced directly; during the holocaust he lost his family and many friends. The Nazis had issues with the Jews only because they were in different and did not have the same traits as everyone else. The German Nazis dehumanized the Jews by starving them of food and water but most of all the Nazis took away their rights as citizens. When Wiesel first arrived at the concentration camp and saw all the walking skeletons, Elie did not want to believe that what he was seeing was real. He wanted to believe that he might be dreaming a horrible nightmare.
The people around him were like the guards and how the guards looked down upon him with disgust. After all, he was just a poor devil in their eyes. Wiesel makes the reader imagine the horrors awaiting the kids in the camps when he says “This was the end! Hitler was about to keep his promise.”. The dread in that statement made by Wiesel is horrifying.
Eleven million people were murdered in the Holocaust, six million of which were Jews who were killed solely for their beliefs. This terrible genocide is recounted through the eyes of Elie Wiesel in his memoir, Night. As the novel progresses, Wiesel's faith in his God falters, due to the physical and emotional suffering he endured as a Jew in the Holocaust. During the first couple of chapters of Night, Wiesel’s faith and dedication to his religion are very strong.
Concentration Camps broke the will of many Jewish prisoners’ faith. They believed that their god had forsaken them, or that he never existed to allow such atrocities to be committed against his people. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, Elie’s faith deteriorates rapidly in the concentration camps. Elie’s faith changed in that as time went on and hope waned, he first accused God of his crimes against his people, holding theocratic debates within himself. By the end of the Novel, he no longer seemed to belief in God.
The Holocaust affects Jews in a way that seems unimaginable, and most of these effects seem to have been universal experiences; however, in the matter of faith, Jews in the concentration camp described in Elie Wiesel’s Night are affected differently and at different rates. The main character, Elie, loses his faith quickly after the sights he witnesses (as well as many others); other Jews hold on much longer and still pray in the face of total destruction. In the beginning, all of the Jews are more or less equally faithful in their God and religion.
Eliezer 's hellish experience is foreshadowed by Madame Shachter 's insane screaming on the train to Auschwitz. The trench of burning babies frightens Wiesel for life. The sight of the furnaces haunts Wiesel and his fellow prisoners all through. The symbol of fire in Night, however, is very ironic. No longer was fire used as a tool of the virtuous to punish the wicked.