A3
Suzy Kassem once wrote, “The gut is the seat of all feeling. Polluting the gut not only cripples your immune system, but also destroys your sense of empathy, the ability to identify with other humans.” The destruction of the human sense of apathy, as mentioned by Suzy Kassem, is the same kind of emotional desensitization that Auschwitz caused Elie to experience. Night by Elie Wiesel uses symbolism, personal conflicts, and flashbacks to show how desensitization leads to people becoming emotionally dormant, as he experienced during his time at Auschwitz.
Through his use of symbolism, Elie exposes the emotional dormancy he experienced during his time at Auschwitz. For example, Elie said, “Then the entire camp filed past the hanged boy...I remember that on that evening, the soup tasted better than ever.” (page 63) In this piece of evidence, a man had just been hanged and Elie, along with the others, were forced to look the dead man in the eye, yet when they eat there soup, it had tasted better than ever before. Depicting that, after the extensive torture they faced, looking a dead man in the eye ceased to spoil their appetite. Another example is when Elie writes, “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: “For God’s sake, where
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The thoughts of condemnation and lack of self-preservation wouldn’t have ravished his mind. Page eighty-six later reveals how Elie “soon forgot him” and became more selfish by “think{ing} of {himself} again.”Throughout much of the book, Elie writes on his selflessness towards protecting and caring for his father, but after facing so much he grows more and more selfish. This quote shows the insensitive nature that Elie developed through his time spent in the concentration camps. Lastly, Elie continually confesses his personal conflict with emotional dormancy through his
The look in his eyes as he gazed me has never left me.” Elie was so damaged physically from the time in camp that he compared himself to a
Next, Elie's father had unfortunately crossed Idek’s path when he went through a fit of rage, and while his father was being beaten with an iron bar, Elie wasn’t thinking about how to help him or how awful these circumstances were, instead he thought, “Why couldn’t he have avoided Idek’s wrath?” (Wiesel 54). Elie blamed his father for the unnecessary beating that he got, he watched it all without moving and kept silent. Instead of helping Elie thought of how he could get away to avoid getting beat himself and found himself angry at his father, not the ruthless
Elie first recalls Dr. Mengele’s “eight short, simple words” (Wiesel 27) when he enters the camps: “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (Wiesel 27) In this part of the book, Elie and his father are separated by his mother and sisters. This metaphorically kills Elie because he is very attached to his family as are they to him. A piece of Elie has been taken away from him forever. Later in his memoir, he mentions the cruel hanging of the Pipel. Previous hangings that day did not phase Elie, but when the young, angelic Pipel was hanged, Elie said his once flavorful soup “tasted of corpses.” A man near Elie was saying “Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: “Where is He? Here He is- He is hanging here on this gallows…”(Wiesel 62) This is a powerful quote that shows how Elie has also began to question his faith. This brings about the mindset of the death of God in Elie. Elie begins to show distrust and rebellion in his God. This is a sharp contrast to Elie’s former beliefs. When Elie’s father dies, Elie emotionally shuts his mind off. He says “After my father’s death, nothing could touch me anymore.” He had finally given up. His father was his rock tied to the balloon, his reason to keep going. Without his father, Elie gave up and became zombified like the rest of the broken souls. Elie fully turned into the emotionless man that he was set to become as a result of surviving
* “Elie even gave his dying father extra rations, despite being told to “stop giving your ration of bread and soup too your old father... in fact you should be getting his rations.”
The reason why he thinks this is because Eli believes he is unworthy. All he looks forward to is bread and soup to eat. Dehumanization made Elie give up hope. Elie's father was beaten because other prisoners found him a nuisance. This hurt Elie and also made him not want to live anymore. Elie thinks, "One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live" (109). Dehumanization made other prisoners very hateful towards one other. This is why they beat Elie's father because they couldn't stand him any longer. Elie saw this and started losing hope of his father and also made him lose hope of living for himself. The Holocaust made Elie lose certainty in God, his self image, and losing ambition. During the Holocaust, the Germans dehumanize Eli. This made his belief in God diminish and was very angered when other Jews were praying to God. Elie believed he was undeserving of being worthy because of this, he thinks of himself as an animal. Losing ambition was the last for Eli because after seeing his father beaten while still sick, it made him realize he no longer cared what happened to him. All these events that happened during the Holocaust were a
Elie observes and experiences many instances of indifference throughout his memoir. In the first chapter, the people of Sighet oppose Moshe the Beadle’s stories of his escape from the Nazis. They say in response to Moshe, “He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! Poor fellow. He's gone mad” (4-5). This lack of sympathy causes Moshe to lose faith in his town and in himself. On the ride to Auschwitz, a soldier dehumanizes the Jews. He explains, “If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot, like dogs” (22). The soldier shows no respect for the people,
The only one who he cared for the most was his father. But once he died Elie felt a sigh of relief and almost felt free that his old washed up father was finally dead. “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears.
Dehumanization played a big role in the holocaust the Nazis reduced the Jews from living human beings to objects and numbers. “Night” by Elie Wiesel published in 1958. In the novel “Night” is about Elie and his time in a concentration camp and how he survived the holocaust. Being separated from his mother and sisters and only left with his father.Dehumanization the process in which the Nazis reduced the Jews from people to objects and numbers.
Yet the prisoners didn’t care about whether or not they would die, moreover, “[they] no longer feared death” (60 emphasis added). As shown when their faces lit up with joy at the destruction that lay ahead of them. Better yet, they weren’t distraught by the insanity of war, rather, they welcomed it. In addition, as their emotions were in disarray, they had to bear witness to the hangings of their fellow prisoners. In the hangings, there’s a sense of detachment among the victims, as Elie states, “I never saw a single victim weep…[they] had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears” (63).
When Elie and his father first entered the camps, his father was struck and Elie did nothing to help his father: "What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails in this criminal's flesh" (39). This shows that, although Elie did not share a close relationship with his father, he still feels that he should stand up for his fahter for the fact that they are father and son. Elie is very violent in that he would have "dug his nails in the criminals' flesh." Evidently, Elie is furious towards the offender. Unfortunately, Elie does not do anything when his father is struck because he does not want to draw attention to himself. Nevertheless, the bond between Elie and his father does strengthen: "And what if he were dead, as well? He was not moving. Suddenly the evidence overwhelmed me: there is no longer any reason to live, any reason to fight" (98-99). Elie reveals that he truly depends on his father for survival. Because he believes his father is no longer alive, he loses all hope for surviavl. Although Elie expresses anger towards his father from time to time because he is being a burden, he still feels that his survival is meaningless without his father. The strong bond that the two developed once they entered the concentration camps proves that nothing can come between them so easily.
During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s outlook on life shifted to a very pessimistic attitude, showing emotions and actions including rebellion, forgetfulness of humane treatment, and selfishness. Elie shows rebellion early in the Holocaust at the Solemn Service, a jewish ceremony, by thinking, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). Elie had already shifted his view on his religion and faith in God. After witnessing some of the traumas of the concentration camps, Elie questioned what he did to deserve such treatment. Therefore, he began to rebel against what he had grown up learning and believing. Not only had Elie’s beliefs changed, his lifestyle changed as well. When Elie’s foot swelled, he was sent to the doctor, where they put him “...in a bed with white sheets. I [he] had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel 78). Many of the luxuries that Elie may have taken for granted have been stripped of their lives, leaving Elie and the other victims on a thin line between survival and death. By explaining that he forgot about many of these common luxuries, Elie emphasizes the inhumane treatment the victims of the Holocaust were put through on a daily basis.
Elie’s father loses his strength quickly, “his eyes [grew] dim” (46) almost immediately after arriving. The horrors which he had seen were easily enough to crush the spirit of a former community leader. His disbelief of the horrors he saw questioned the very basis of his soul, and he began to despair. His father’s eyes soon become, “veiled with despair” (81), as he loses hope for survival. The despair of camp life shrouds the human within, showing only another cowed prisoner. Elie’s father no longer can see hope, having his vision clouded by cruelty and hate. Elie’s father is eventually overwhelmed by despair; he, “would not get up. He knew that it was useless” (113). The Nazis crushed his soul, killed his family, stole his home, and eventually took his life; this treatment destroyed the person inside the body. He could no longer summon the strength to stay alive, so he gave up, and collapsed.
Elie Wiesel reveals quite a few things when his attitude towards himself changes. The reader can be find in Wiesel's memoir, “Night” on pages 113 finds on page 113 that Elie no longer cares about anyone or anything other than survival and food at this point of his life during the Holocaust, on the very last pages of his book. For the longest time Elie only cared for his father and that was what kept his thrive to survive alive, watching over him, worrying about him, and protecting him was all he seemed to do. Once his father died, Elie had an entirely different view point set in his mind "Since my father's death, nothing mattered to me anymore. ...I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat" (Wiesel 113). Elie only wanted
After 3 weeks at Auschwitz, they get deported to Buna, which is a turning point for the relationship between Elie and Chlomo. The camps influence Elie and give him a crooked mind focused on staying alive and nothing else. This leads to him disregarding his father. This twisted way of thinking, due to the camps, is making Elie cheer during bomb raids at Buna. He states his thoughts “But we were no longer afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death” (57). This shows that he is willing to die to see the camps destroyed. The most horrifying event that demonstrates his twisted mind is when Eliezer pays no heed to his father while he was being repeatedly beat with an iron bar. Eliezer, rather than acting indifferent and showing nothing, actually feels angry with his father. “I was angry at him for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak” (52). The new lifestyle of the camps affected Elie and his relationship with his father for the worse.
In Elie Wiesel's memoire, instincts of self-preservation overwhelm all other human emotion. While at Auschwitz Elie and his father were transferred to new barracks were Elie's father was beaten by a gypsy inmate who was in charge for politely asking were the bathroom was. Elie describes his reaction of standing petrified and thinking "What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this. My father must have guessed my thoughts, because he whispered in my ear: 'It doesn’t hurt.' His cheek still bore the red mark of the hand." (3.117-120)Elie's lack of reaction showcases how the environment of the concentration camp was already conditioning Elie to put his needs of survival ahead of his human identity. Weasels description of the events show how the brutality of the camps have changed Elie's actions and thoughts because Elie knows that interfering in the encounter would mean sacrificing basic survival; love and human emotions are no longer a priority.