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Night By Elie Wiesel

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Night by Elie Wiesel is a novel of post-Holocaust literature. It is a story about a Jewish man and his family and of the unspeakable horrors that they endured during World War II. Night is a retelling of a terrible story, everything that leads to Wiesel and his family entering Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp to this day, and the aftermath of liberation. Night is an incredibly well written novel. It twines together the power of fear and the loss of faith. It touches on how humanity changes in the face of power and oppression. This novel is able to not only testify, but discuss the atrocities of events that are not easily spoken about. Wiesel manages to takes many difficult subjects like murder, religion, and false hope and force people …show more content…
This struggle is a strong theme all throughout Night. Many times, Wiesel would go back and forth with his belief in God. It showed how evil and terrible cruelty can make faith waver, but throughout the novel, Wiesel also shows how despite everything, he still found reasons to pray or thank his God. In these moments, it forced me to try and understand the complexity of his situation. In the very beginning of the novel, Wiesel’s faith is very strong. When asked why he prays, he says “why did I live? Why did I breathe” (Wiesel 4)? For Wiesel, his faith is as natural to him as breathing and life itself. On Wiesel’s first day in the camps, the realization that it is a death camp materializes his first feeling of disbelief in his God. After hearing his father recite the prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, he became angry. He thought to himself, “Why should I sanctify his name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for” (Wiesel 33)? Not many people question God’s actions. In many religions, God has a plan and a reason for everything. For Wiesel, he cannot fathom a world where God would allow this to happen. For this reason, his belief in God begins to waver. Further in Night, Wiesel ends up thanking God for a seemingly insignificant reason. When the Kapo came around taking everyone’s new shoes, Wiesel was spared because his were covered in a thick layer of mud. In that moment, Wiesel “thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe” (Wiesel 38). When I first read this, I thought it was ridiculous that someone would thank god for mud. But thinking further about the situation, I realized that Wiesel has been through so much and he will go through much more in the future. While everything for him is

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