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Change In Elie Wiesel's Night

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Eliezer’s Character Change The Holocaust was a devastating time in history where Jews were forced into concentration camps and worked, starved, or burned to death. One of the most influential writers who lived during this time period was Elie Wiesel. Wiesel’s Night is a memoir depicting the journey of a young boy, Eliezer, who experienced the Holocaust at a very young age. The Nazis occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, and Eliezer and his family are deported to a concentration camp. While at several different concentration camps, Eliezer faces a variety of different situations, and he learns to adapt to his circumstances. As his father becomes weaker and weaker throughout the memoir, Elie starts to develop mixed emotions for him. During …show more content…
When Elie and his family approach Birkenau, a reception center for Aushwtiz, the first sight and odor that Eliezer is exposed to are flames and the smell of dead humans. Elie states, “In front of us flames. In the air that smell of burning flesh” (Wiesel 21). The powerful smell of decaying bodies and the horrific sight of fire demonstrate Elie’s emotional changes in persona because he starts to feel terrified; before he even steps foot into Birkenau, Wiesel experiences mixed emotional changes from the image and odor presented to him. As a result, his feeling about his future at the concentration camps starts to change dramatically. Before he was able to visualize and smell the horrifying camp, he was oblivious to the events taking place at the concentration camps. The imagery provided by the flames and flesh slowly lead to Elie’s emotional perception of humanity to change in a negative manner, and he starts to become more aware about his situation. Moreover, it is evident that Elie starts to feel his safety being compromised, and he mentally begins to question his destiny as he enters Birkenau. The imagery of the sight of flames and smell of corpses in the beginning of the memoir is included to spark the mixed emotions Wiesel faces throughout the

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