...Faith is an important part of life because it gives people something to believe in and hope for. In the story “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, has to learn how to survive the Holocaust. Throughout the the story, he faces hardships and daunting challenges that almost cost him his life. By examining the novel “Night”, we can see that faith is the key to survival, which is important because those who do not have faith often lose focus of the importance of surviving. Elie survives because he has faith. He believes God will save them from a terrible fate. In the story he says, “Oh God, Lord of the Universe, take pity on us in Thy great mercy…”(29) This quote shows that Elie wants God to save him and his people from the atrocious Hungarian police and impending future. Although Elie’s faith decreased and increased throughout the story, he still managed to make it out alive....
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...Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the story of the Holocaust, the mass genocide of the Jewish people and important event in WWII. The memoir Night begins in the polish town of Sighet. The story is About Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy whose family gets deported to the concentration camp with other Jews from his town. Upon arrival his Mother and Sister, Tzipora are separated and executed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp. Following that, after months of work, with the advancing allied front, the prisoners were forced to march all night to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. As Elie’s story continues, after being stuffed inside a camp barrack for 3 days without food or water, the Prisoners were let out for a selection, Elie’s Father was chosen to...
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...Loss, one word with so many meanings and simple and nothing can change it. Loss, of a loved one, faith, trust, happiness, your own life; and once it is gone, it is lost, and good luck trying to find it. Sayonara, au revoir, adios, bye. Elie Wiesel’s Night deals with his loss of faith in his God. Wiesel’s problem can be root all the way back to 1942, the beginning of Elie’s awakening, his first insight into the real world, his first insight into the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a horrid event, of ruthless killing, of senseless slaughter, destroying families, and a whirlwind of destruction. Under strain, ones happiness and ones faith is slowly whittled under the knife of opposition and pressure. Elie has lost so much through out his life, losing his family, his friends, but most importantly his faith. The first example of Elie loosing his faith is when he arrived at Auschwitz, Elie and his father are directed to go to the left; a prisoner then informs them that they are on their way to the crematory, Elie’s father recites the Kaddish or prayer for the dead, revolt rises up inside of Elie and he questions God, “Why should I bless His name? The Eternal, lord of the Universe, the All-Powerful and Terrible, was silent. What had I to thank Him for? (Wiesel 31)”. Elie is hopeless, his situation rendering him of his beliefs unable to believe that a holy being could cause such grief. He was stricken with terror that even after his prayers, his deep devotion to the great “lord” that God...
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...Wiesel’s Changes of Faith The Holocaust brought about many hardships and created severe adversity for its victims that may have created experiences ultimately too traumatic that transformed their lives for years to come, either through starvation and labor in the concentration camps or execution and incineration in the extermination camps. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tells the story of himself as a young Jewish boy born in Romania, who in 1944, was forced into ghettos with the rest of the Jewish citizens and later deported, along with his father, to the Nazi’s largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. While living through this day-to-day horrifying basis, Elie begins to live with overwhelming fear and total alienation, as well as his increasing loss of faith on God and whether God is even existent or not for His lack of participation in trying to help the Jews. Although Elie manages to survive his long and frightening journey through both labor and death camps, his faith was never at the high-most air-reaching level as it dramatically changed throughout the course of the novel because of his disturbing experiences in witnessing cremated human beings, executions, and the going through the loss of his entire family. Prior to being deported to the camps, Elie’s faith was extremely high as he was well-established with his studies in mysticism and the cabbala and his great involvement with religion through prayers. Elie is finding a great interest in wanting to...
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...learned? Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel speaks of the importance of sharing his story and others alike to demonstrate to people an event in which he and millions of others lost so much to never happen again. Wiesel speaks of “those moments that murdered [his] God” as he pushes to survive and realizes he will no longer be the same boy as before but a man willing to persevere through the camps without religion to guide him and emphasizes the loss he feels in the camps (Wiesel 34). As Elie Wiesel documents his experience of the Holocaust in his memoir Night, he uses rhetorical questions to demonstrate how the belief in God is challenged, and ultimately lost, during times of tremendous suffering. At the arrival of the first camp,...
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...of the Jewish faith. The Holocaust is a systematic genocide of Jewish people and other groups that lasts from 1933 to 1945 under the control of a German dictator, Adolf Hitler. Elie Wiesel is only 15 years old when he and his family are sent to Auschwitz and 16 years old when he is liberated from the concentration camp. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel demonstrates the loss of Jewish identity during the Holocaust through his use of literary devices: personification, foreshadowing, and metaphors. The Jews experience a loss of identity and self value before they even get to the camps due to the dehumanizing acts of authoritative...
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...Elie Wiesel’s Loss of Innocence There comes a time in one’s life where a tragic event results in the loss of innocence and an increase in knowledge. Unfortunately this is one of life’s few promises. Some experience this ablution a lot sooner than they should. In children who survived the holocaust in concentration camps, their innocence was taken as soon as their ordinary everyday life was imposed upon by the Nazis. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, he describes himself as an innocent teenager, a child whose innocence was taken from him as the result of the nefariousness performed by the Nazis in World War Two. Elie and his family were transported to Birkenau where his family was torn apart, leaving him with his father, his sisters and his mother. Once they were separated, he began to slowly lose his innocence. Towards the end of 1941, in the small village of Sighet, Hungary, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spent most of his time studying the Talmud. Elie was one of four children born to his mother and father. Hilda was the eldest, then Bea, he was the third, and Tzipora was the youngest. The two eldest sisters helped the parents run the family store while Elie stayed home to study. Elie was very passionate about the theology of his religion, Judaism. He studied Talmud by day and by night he would go to the synagogue to pray. One of his main interests was Kabbalah which is an aspect of Jewish mysticism. Elie asked his father to find him a master to guide him in his...
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...“Faith isn't a feeling. It’s a choice to trust God even when the road ahead seems uncertain” -Dave Willis The struggle of leaving God behind come into the minds and hearts of prisoners during the Holocaust. In Night by Elie Wiesel, a young boy, Elie, finds himself in the exact situation when Elie and his father are separated from the rest of the family and put in the concentration camps. There, they are treated like animals, the cruel treatment is excruciating and hard to handle, but Elie makes it out alive leaving his father behind. During the traumatic experience, Elie Wiesel and other Jews were exposed to a great deal of cruel treatment in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Therefore, he was struggling to keep his faith in the midst of it all....
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...In the memoir, "Night", by Eliezer Wiesel, Elie's relationship with other characters is explored. These relationships which are critically centralized within the text play an essential part in the characterisation of the protagonist Elie. One such relationship is that between Elie and his father, which helps in the characterisation of Elie . Another ongoing relationship explored within the text is between Elie and God, which is essential in the further characterization of Elie. Elie's relationship with himself is seen to be centralized in the memoir. Elie's relationship with his father is a critically explored central point in the text because it plays a key role in Elie's character development as it displays Elie's growing selfishness and lack of care toward his father. Through the use of a quote from Pg 35 where Elie is seen to describe that "My head was buzzing ...not to be separated from my father" Wiesel portrays Elie as a loving son and is able to illustrate a strong father-son relationship. Additionally by...
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...In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when This is when Wiesel began to disbelieve or lose faith, for example, ‘’How could I say to him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?¨(Wiesel 67).He is confused on why he would continue to pray for his god. A reason is because he had let so many people died and made them surfer. As the author describes is experience, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed. Two significant themes related to inhumanity discussed in the book Night by Elie Wiesel are loss of faith and becoming closer to a loved ones. One theme in the Night...
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...barbarous time in history, the preservation of strong faith is what people thought would help them to endure through the dark times and give them hope. However, it was nearly impossible to trust God and His plan when the ground around the prisoners assumed the role of a graveyard and the living struggled to survive through the night. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust and prisoner of multiple concentration camps in Europe, wrote the memoir Night about his unimaginable suffering during...
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...Questioning faith is something that happens to most people but the majority have not had it stripped away or been forced to question entire religious beliefs. Elie Wiesel did. In Night by Elie Wiesel, he discusses how Jews were stripped of their homes, titles, gold, and religion. He explains his story of being deported and taken to concentration camps, where he endured countless cruel acts. Elie once an extremely religious young man, tells the story of losing his faith during those horrific months. Eliezer’s loss of faith forever impacted him because seeing such horrible things made it hard for him to have faith how he previously did. Before being taken to any concentration camps, Elie is devoutly religious and is extremely faithful. Wiesel...
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...English 10 Rough Draft Essay In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author uses symbolism, and metaphors to show the theme loss of faith. Both Elie and his father express signs that they have lost faith in the Jewish religion. This is important because religion is supposed to help people through hard times, and give them faith in the world around them. The first example of this is when all of the Jewish civilians are forced to wear the yellow Star of David. When Mr. Wiesel was asked what the community should do about being shamefully forced to wear the star. His response was rather nonchalant stating. “The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal…” (11) This shows that Mr. Wiesel is not holding the offense to his religion in high regard, showing...
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...* The Holocaust By Chelsea Nguyen 11 Silver QUESTION NUMBER 3: Discuss the relationship Wiesel has with God throughout Night. Eliezer Wiesel presents the Jewish faith in a moment of extreme darkness however, what gives him the courage and strength to continue to live is his connection with religion and his relationship with God. Initially Elie shows strong devotion, then becomes disillusioned with God’s power, and ultimately redefines the position God holds in his life. In the beginning, Elie Wiesel’s relationship with God in Night shows strong devotion. Wiesel made spirituality inherent to all activities, wished to spend his life focused around Judaism, and devoted all his free time and energy on religious studies. Wiesel believed that religion was a basic survival need, showing that he followed his religion instinctively. When asked why he prayed, Wiesel couldn’t think of a proper answer and thought, “…strange question, why did I live, why did I breathe?”. Wiesel maintained confidence in religion as the situation deteriorated. Wiesel and his people gave thanks to God for survival, keeping hope that God was putting them through a test of hardships what would keep them alive if they kept their faith. When they had arrived at Auschwitz, they thanked God and were able to regain their confidence because, “Here was a sudden release from the terrors of the previous nights”. Wiesel thanked God for the little things that helped him because he wanted a sense of protection and...
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...was an awful and traumatic experience that greatly affected the lives of several Jews who survived it. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Eliezer witnesses the evil humans are capable of during the Holocaust. During his time in the concentration camps, he begins to change as a person. In the book, Night by Elie Wiesel the evil nature of humankind leads to the destructive changes of Eliezer's beliefs, his humanity and his personal relationships. Elie Wiesel utilizes Eliezer's loss of faith, his loss of humanity and his relationship with his father to show that the war between good and evil not only takes place between countries but also within the mind of a human. In the novel, Eliezer's loss of faith is a result of the unspeakable horrors...
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