Symbolism In Elie Wiesel's Night

Envision a barrack, congested and overcrowded with the exhausted and emaciated. Even the dead and dying are your assailants as you fight through a massive wall of bodies for the chance to drawn in a breath. The living are as pitiful as the forgotten corpses they abandoned while marching through the snow, devoid of feeling and sentiment. Suddenly, the song of a lone violin, resonant in its isolation, floats through the dismal barrack. The musician is not a glorious soloist with thousands of adoring fans, but a boy on his deathbed. Elie Wiesel describes this moment in his memoir of the Holocaust, Night. The Jews had become empty shells forced to march through the glacial, incapitating cold after the concentration camp's evacuation. However, Juliek,
It did not protect and comfort them like a real shelter, but housed their misery and kept them prisoner with their own hopelessness. The atmosphere emanated a miasma of anguish and fear as people clawed through corpses to escape suffocation. However, Juliek took out his violin, and cut through the darkness. "Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound"(95). Eliezer emphasizes the contrast between the miserable setting and Juliek's playing. To him, it might as well be an orchestra of angels, the only music in a silence brought on by suffering and sorrow. Juliek's performance was more than a mere fragment of music, it carried the symbolism of his fading life and aspirations that he could not express
Juliek's very soul and being vibrated against the strings of his violin, presenting to a dying audience the essence of a shattered future and scorched life that they all shared. He performed Beethoven, an artist the Jews were forbidden to play, a final act of defiance from someone who had everything stolen from him. Juliek would never play again, never feel or dream or live again; but he spent his last fleeting moments as a concert of one. While others were slowly overtaken by death, Juliek summoned the strength to bid farewell to his fallen comrades. Even though he had withered away to almost nothing, this one song had the power to carry Juliek's heart and soul throughout the desolate barrack. The Nazis had failed to take that power away from