Symbolism In Night By Elie Wiesel

During the Holocaust, food played a significant part. It was important for the way people took care of themselves and survived. The reason being was that in the concentration camps it was every man for himself and they sought food to stay healthy. Elie Wiesel had managed to keep himself strong and healthy for his father.

Elie Wiesel concluded his memoir, Night, by describing his feelings when he sees himself in the mirror for the first time since he left the ghetto. The purpose of this is to portray the state his body and mind is in. Elie describes himself as a corpse because his humanity had been stolen from him after so many years of suffering. Elie also was at the brink of starvation and death, which would have contributed to his corpse-like appearance. Elie went nearly an entire week without eating, and this is detrimental to his body.

For my creative response to Night by Elie Wiesel, I decided to make an alternative book cover. The theme that I chose to portray in my adaptation of the cover is the journey from darkness to light. My cover is black at the top and the amount of black reduces towards the bottom of the cover. I did this to show the transition from darkness to light that is shown during this novel.

At one point, Elie uttered, "Oh God, Master of the Universe, in your infinite compassion, have mercy on us. . .”(p.20). Grounded by the idea of faith in his God, that He is everywhere, and that His divinity touches every aspect of his life. However, he was forced to witness the brutal reality of evil and suffering that the Germans were doing to the Jews. When he began to question his faith in his loving God, “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes”(p.34).

In the beginning of Elie Wiesel’s Night Elie is very faithful to God and eager to learn about God, the Kabbalah, and mysticism. When asked why does he pray Elie answered, “Why did I live? Why did I breathe?(4) ” After one of God’s Followers and Elie’s leader, Moishe the Beadle gets back from the forests everything changed. News about the Holocaust starts to spread.

Before I begin discussing about the symbolism in Night, I want to point out the importance of symbolism in any form of storytelling, and even in reality. In a way, symbolism is what makes ordinary objects or symbols into meaning. Symbolism can make anything as powerful as actual words. In that sense, symbolism creates the story being read. I believe a story can become more powerful and more touching if there is a very symbolic object or symbol involved.

"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night"(Wiesel 34). Through Elie Wiesel’s witness of a genocide of his own people, the horrors that became his reality for a period of time was a never ending series of darkness. In his memoir Night, Wiesel uses night to symbolize a period of suffering and despair during his experience through the Holocaust. Night also symbolizes the darkness and hole left in Wiesel after this disaster has occured. Many survivors of the Holocaust are still terrified to tell their stories based on the fact that what they experienced still remains shocking to express.

For me, the greatest moment of sadness in the memoir is when Elie’s father dies. His death is gruesome and much suffering is shown throughout the last pages of the memoir. A dramatic shift is made in Elie’s perspective after this traumatic event. His father serves as his sole motivation to continue on in their cruel conditions and without him Elie is hopeless and alone. I feel Elie's father's death also symbolizes the unjustness of their situation.

The Nazi's dehumanizes the Jews like animals by being psychologically deprived of their necessities. In the beginning of the story, the Hungarian police and later the SS soldiers force all the Jewish people into ghettos, Elie says: "There was no longer any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate" (Wiesel 21). The Hungarian police and the Nazi's take away the Jews individual rights as people and their safety as they are placed in a confined space they are seen as the same. Consequently, at the death camp, Auschwitz Elie was given a number along with other Jewish people to symbolically show them that they are inferior to the Germans: "I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other

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.

Eliezer is a young Jewish boy who studies Talmud and Kabbalah. The next day, his teacher Moishe the Beadle a group of deportees are on a train that get hijacked and everyone is taken captive. A very awful, tragic event occurs, the Gestapo (the group that hijacks the train) executes the deportees who were “used as targets” (6). Moishe survives the massacre but is very unstable and is driven to despair and cries “tears, like drop of wax” because the people do not believe him (7). There are now new laws to abide by, every Jew has to wear the yellow star and no longer has the right to perform certain acts.

Elie Wiesel mentioned in his Novel "Night" that the prisoners came from a religious community, ¨The Jew of Sighet¨ (p. 3). Yom Kippur was a solemn Jew religious holiday where adults abstained from eating and drinking for long hours, except for sick people, children, pregnant women, or those who gave birth. Jews sought forgiveness of their sins by fasting. Even In a non-ordinary situation like the death camp, some Jews believed that they needed to fast more than any other day to clean their soul and seek forgiveness from God. They could not give away everything and became nonbelievers regardless of the horrific circumstances, especially for Elie, who learned and studied his religion at an early age, ¨ I studied Talmud, and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the

During World War II, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi controlled concentration camps abducted millions of European Jews and were responsible for the deaths of over 6 million people. For those who survived, they were left with extreme physical and emotional scars that would never fade. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he reveals the heartbreaking backstory of the Holocaust and the traumatizing effects it had on him, which left him comparing himself to a corpse after liberation. Elie Wiesel’s mirror reflection is that of a corpse at the end of his memoir, Night, because of the immense loss he experiences during the Holocaust.

The infamous Yin and Yang symbol, a balance between good and evil. There isn’t one without the other. Balance is the way it’s intended, for everything to be equal. However this is simply not accurate, nothing is perfect, the balance can tip towards any side. For some there is more light than there is darkness.

After going through the holocaust many victims said that they suffered from PTSD, depression, and sleep disorders other had health problems due to the poor conditions of the camp. Night by Elie Wiesel is about the authors expirence of the holocaust as a teenage boy and how it slowly starts to break his pyche. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author uses conflict, characterization, symbolism to enhance the theme that putting people in tortuous situations causes mentality and body to break. The conflict of misery Elie and others had to go through because of the Holocaust.