This quote is the final sentence of the book. Elie was liberated from Auschwitz, but had become ill so he was in a hospital room. He looked at himself for the first time since he was in the camp. Throughout his life in the concentration camp he became frail, and had lost a significant amount of weight. He had narrowly escaped death countless times, one being when he wasn’t chosen during selection, and another being the trip he had to endure during liberation. His experience with those horrific things changed him as a young boy. He lost his innocence and lost his individuality in the camp. When he looked into the mirror, the boy staring back at him was a stranger. He looked like a ghost, weak, and had no emotion. He noticed how the camp took …show more content…
The corpse also represents what Elie was stripped of, what parts of him died. He lost his family, faith, clothes, personal belongings, anything that made him a human. The death of Elie's father sent him into a depressive spiral. Elie’s strength came from his father and how he went through this trauma with him. With the death of his father, he lost himself. Losing his father was like losing a part of his heart, and that feeling never left. The last line in the quote is “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (115). Elie realized that he will never be able to return back to normal life. His faith in humanity would forever be tainted from the Holocaust. His experience in Auschwitz was perfectly summed up by this quote. I relate to this quote deeply. I have always struggled with my body and my self image. When I was younger, I was a lot chubbier than I am now. I would look into the mirror and hate the girl that was staring back at me. I would notice my imperfections, and instead of loving my body, I hated it. During quarantine, I came to the realization of what my mind was telling me about my body. I started to learn how to love my body, how to find the perfections instead of the
and he says that. He went through so much on the way to the camps and then seeing that once he got there changed him, and probably everyone else that went through it all too. He was able to stay with his
In the beginning of the book Night Elie describes himself as someone who believes profoundly. One way that Auschwitz and/or other campers have affected this by, putting him down, watching innocent people die by getting either shot or hanged in front of his little eyes. In the first chapter of Night the quote, “Why did I pray? Strange question.
Elie experienced a lot of fear during the Holocaust. He was always scared because there wasn’t really a time when you shouldn’t. They always lived in death the entire time they were in Auschwitz.
He went from loving himself and the world to saying “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me” (Wiesel 115). in the last line. Which shows that after all he went through he had seen nothing in himself anymore. All he saw was a dead corpse, a corpse that looked like all the bodies he saw in the camps. Lastly Elie becomes distant with his father.
Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night, is a memoir that describes the horrific experiences of both Elie and other Jews. Elie’s journey is largely about a loss of innocence, faith, and family. Elie Wiesel’s purpose in ending his memoir by describing what he saw as he looked at himself in the mirror was to demonstrate how he was emotionally dead from his experiences. To begin with, Wiesel’s emotional death was created by the dehumanization he and other Jews experienced. Perhaps, the scene that most reveals the dehumanization of Wiesel and his fellow Jews was a scene where a starved man kills his father for a piece of bread.
When Elie was in the concentration camp after a while he started to get used to all the death going around him, and the promise of hope to be diminished if it to come to anyone. He started to become empty with no feeling except hunger, no fear, no sorrow, no pity for his father, just the hungriness that was starting to drive him mad with all the others, “ No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.”(pg 115). He didn't have any thought of revenge or to make them suffer like he did. He found his sister afterwards and reunited with her, but that same emptiness that came with what he had been though was still there, and was to stay .
Holocaust-Researcher and author Daniel Schwarz remarks that "[Elie’s] father is the eternal flame to which he returns as a boy" (Schwarz 12). His father is the link back to Sighet, his family, and his innocent childhood. Out of the need for a reason to live, Elie clings to the final thing he had left: his
Elie says,” One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myslef in the mirror on the opposite wall. I have not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. THe look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me. Elie’s identiy died becasue he could no longer recognize the person that he used to be before the time of the concentration
He knows that death could come at any day, and still managed to give his soup and bread to his father. Without Elie’s father being there he would give up. Elie tried everything i his power to keep his father alive with him. One night Elie and his father were asleep in a shed and some of the other Jews thought that his father was dead. Elie did everything that he could to wake his father up, because if he did not then the Jews were going to throw him outside to die.
He is concerned about the boy worrying about his father’s survival as well as his own. Elie is saying that his father is weak and close to death, he is determined to keep him alive and for them to stay together, even though his actions pose a great risk to
From Auschwitz, the two are moves to two other camps, and participate in a death marth to Buchenwald. As Elie spends more time in the camps, he becomes angry and resentful, toward the camp itself, as well as his father for falling ill and not being able to care for him. In Buchenwald, his father dies, from illness and a beating from the SS, only three months from liberation. As the story progresses, Elie also begins to lose sight of his faith, becoming bitter, and stating “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust” (Wiesel, 32). Being subject to the cruel and continuous torture of the Holocaust left Elie
While Elie is a prisoner, he faces serious detriments in his emotional health. He is no longer able to stand up for his father when he’s being beat by a gypsy at Auschwitz: “Now remorse began to gnaw at me. I thought only: I shall never forgive them for that,” (Wiesel 37). Elie continues to change by becoming more of an “every man for himself” prisoner. When they are marching to Gleiwitz, Zalman, one of his fellow prisoners, says that he can’t go any longer because of the pain that he’s in.
Never shall [he] forget those things, even were [he] condemned to live as long as God Himself” (Wiesel 75). This quote leads me to believe that the suffering endured in the camps lead Elie to become lost with who he was. Elie and the other members of the Jewish community try to keep their faith as much as they can even though it is being tested. As shown in Night enduring suffering forces people to become much different versions of themselves.
Elie was held captive in concentration camps from 1944-1945. During his time in the concentration camps, he became grateful for what he had, overcame countless obstacles, and more importantly kept fighting until he was free. [The Holocaust is very important to learn about because it can teach you some important life lessons.] You should always be grateful for what you have, no matter what the circumstances are. This lesson can be learned when Elie says, “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me any more”(109).
By the time he suffered during the Holocaust, his prayers, religious characteristics, and faith were slowly disappearing. Seeing tragic moments about what he had been witnessed and experienced was hard to forget, for example: using babies as a shooting target, not eating for 3-6 days, getting beat up, and all the bad things you can imagine about. By in the middle of the book he started to think himself that he has to do it alone and not to care about everyone else that engulfed him. In the end, he accepted God’s challenge and learned to not give up. On the book, Elie is talking about a boy named Pipel who got hanged up by the SS officers.