The level of cruelty on display, on a daily basis in the concentration camp is overwhelming. The risk of jeopardizing one’s life is a daily tribulation. As Elie watches his father being beaten with an iron bar by Idek, their German-Jewish Kapo, he does nothing. “I watched it all happening without moving. I kept silent. In fact I thought of stealing away in order to not suffer the blows.” Elie could have helped his father but he knew that if he did he would also be senselessly beaten, essentially putting his life in jeopardy and then he wouldn’t be able to help his father recover.…
Elie Wiesel’s relationship with humanity changes from frustrated towards the Jews to awareness of what it happening as he moves through the 2 ghettos in Sighet. When Elie was in the ghetto the Germans were not lashing out on them but left them to live in a community where all Jews were segregated from non-Jews, and soon they started to see what…
Even in the most horrifying circumstances, people make choices about how to behave. For example, in his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel faces countless choices as he endures the vilest adversity: genocide. For example, as his ailing father approaches his end, Elie may either abandon him or help him. For a moment Elie considers the former option, but he brushes the thought aside. In Night, Elie writes that “It [the thought] was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty” (Wiesel 111). Atrocity attempts to persuade Elie to the dark of night, but he decides to stay in the light. Instead of giving in to his own animal need to survive, Elie exhibits elevated ethics and supports his father until his death. For this, Elie’s character develops. Elie realizes his strength, his perseverance, and his heart. However, it is not, as Horace asserts, the adversity in itself that summons these traits. To even suggest that the Holocaust might have produced something constructive is heinous. Rather, Elie makes a choice that rouses these talents of will from their slumber in his unconscious and draws them to the forefront of his mind. Adversity opens the door to character growth, and Elie elicits his own…
Like Elie Wiesel said, “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” Elie Wiesel wrote a book about his life during the holocaust. In the book he talks about racism and hatred toward the Jewish religion. This relates to how people are judged at court for their appearance and how they talk or look. People who have a low socioeconomic status are disadvantaged in the criminal justice system especially when examining how they do not have enough money for a good lawyer, they won’t be able to pay off any of their fines and they may or may not have enough money to buy nice clothes for court.…
One of the worst things about the dehumanization that Wiesel faced is not only did he have to endure such cruelty but that it succeeded in stripping him of his virtues and self. This happened, on some level, to all of the Holocaust victims; a sad truth that is shown in the journey to Buchenwald. Riding once again in a roofless cattle wagon with no food or privacy, the Jewish prisoners were little more than mindless, frozen bodies. When a loaf of bread was…
Elie Wiesel experiences indifference taking away his humanity by being a prisoner of war. Wiesel was kept at a secluded concentration camp for years. He felt like the world viewed him as imaginary, and had forgotten about his suffering as well as the suffering of other’s in the concentration…
Elie Wiesel went through a lot from the before the start of the holocaust till the day he got in and concentration camps. He changed drastically from the day he went into the camps until he got out. Three things that changed in Elie was his personality, his faith, and his relationship with his father.…
At the age of 15, Elie Wiesel and his entire family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the Holocaust, which took the lives of more than 6 million Jews. Wiesel was sent to Buna Werke labor camp, Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Elie has changed drastically in this book entirely, he has gotten scarred and changed physically and mentally. Reading the book I felt like he has gotten depression throughout the whole story. This whole book is just relating to the topic of him never forgetting the smoke, never forgetting what had scarred him for life, and basically seeing small children get smoked up into flames. The greatest numbers of victims were killed in concentration camps, in which Jews and other enemies of Germany were gathered, imprisoned, forced into labor, they were forced to work in such deplorable, inhumane conditions. Yes, indeed Elie Wiesel has changed dramatically throughout his young years of his life, and he has become a changed man. He was spiritually dead, unemotional, and sensitive, and that is what the holocaust has done to Elie…
Eliezer Wiesel, a boy from Sighet, has survived a horrible experience in the hands of the Germans. It all started in 1942 when Moishe the Beadle, his friend and instructor in the Kabbalah, was deported from Sighet. Moishe escaped to warn others of the horrors that awaited them. Sadly, no one wanted to listen, even though Eliezer “[had] asked [his] father to sell everything, to liquidate everything, and to leave” (Wiesel 08). A few months after that, the Germans invaded Sighet, promptly ordered the Jews to give up anything valuable, and then ended up making them stay with other Jews in a ghetto. After, Jews were eventually deported in cattle cars, not knowing where they were to end up. Eliezer’s first view of the concentration camp where they first arrived was “flames rising from a small chimney into a black sky” (Wiesel 27) and “In the air, the smell of burning flesh” (Wiesel 28). Life in the concentration camps was awfully…
Elie Wiesel was only 15 during the Holocaust when he was sent to a concentration camp with his mother father and sisters. Elie during his time at the a concentration camp, Auschwitz was dehumanized and mentally broken and lost hope. Elie when he was in the camp wasn’t…
Friedman, Maurice. “Elie Wiesel: The Job of Auschwitz.” Responses to Elie Wiesel. Ed. Harry James Cargas. New York: Persea, 1978. 205-207. Print.…
Unlike the rest of his family, Elie lived to tell his story. In 1956, Wiesel's book, Night, was officially published. Night told the story of what happened behind the doors of one of the biggest concentration camps. The name of this camp was Auschwitz. Thousands of people were taken to this camp along with numerous other camps. Now the camps That Elie and his family were sent to were not like the happy, fun camps filled with games and activities you think of, concentration camps were filled with pain and suffering. Elie tells us his thought of the first night at the camp, “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....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never, thus showing his permanent scarring from this horrific tragedy. They were forced to work and those that were to unfit to work were killed or taken to labs were they were experimented on. Every day was the same thing,…
“And yet, having lived through this experience, one could not keep silent no matter how difficult, if not impossible, it was to speak” (Wiesel introduction). Elie Wiesel introduces his tragic memoir Night with the fact that silence was not the answer for victims of atrocities. This memoir depicts Elie Wiesel’s experiences at Auschwitz, one of the cruelest concentration camps during the Holocaust. Through the pain and seemingly eternal silence that fell upon the victims, a voice needed arise to shed light on the broken actions in the world. Elie Wiesel, in his memoir Night, reminds the world that “silence” or “indifference” to atrocities committed anywhere is an unacceptable answer to those in need.…
The desire for power, fear, and self-preservation can cause people to change in ways one could not imagine. In the story, Night by Elie Wiesel, and Gerda Weissman Klein’s All But My Life, the authors share their tragic experiences from their times in Nazi concentration camps. In Addition, Klein’s All But My Life shows her experience in many different concentration camps for three years and how differently female inmates were treated than male. In Wiesel’s Night, he discusses his experience of being sent to Auschwitz along with his father for a year and how the tragedies he endured transformed his character. In Addition, Klein’s All But My Life shows her experience in many different concentration camps for three years and how differently female…
The book Night is a horrifying flashback of Elie’s life during a terrible event, the Holocaust. Eli was a young Jew during World War Two. Reading the book about Elie’s survival of the Holocaust can educate individuals about the terrible things that happened, and how they survived. Eli lived off of nothing but the hope that him and his father would make it out alive. He had no food, no water, and barely any shelter. The Holocaust was a heart-breaking, gut wrenching event. There was an enormous amount of victims that were being tortured. One scene from the book shows one spec of torture individuals went through: “The snow began to form a thick layer over our blankets. They brought us bread – the usual ration. We threw ourselves upon it. Someone had the idea of appeasing his thirst by eating the snow. Soon the others were imitating him. As we were not allowed to bend down, everyone took out his spoon and ate the accumulated snow off his neighbor's back. A mouthful of bread and a spoonful of snow. The SS who were watching laughed at this spectacle.” There are a few individuals who survived, such as Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel, who both wrote about the Holocaust. Because there were survivors, it is easier for individuals to become more educated from the experiences of the ancestors.…