The Holocaust was very extreme, forcing victims to make a choice between prioritizing their own survival or allowing a close friend or family member to live. Some people would not have survived unless they could steal clothes or food from another person else, and countless others selflessly surrendered their own resources allowing a family member to stay alive. Night is a novel written by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. In Auschwitz, the officers deprived Elie and the other prisoners of food, resources and clean living space. Prisoners had to sacrifice morality if they wanted to live. My Life in Germany is a short story by Rosa Marie Burger. It takes place in the Holocaust's early days and highlights the sharp loss of rights that the German Jews endured. They felt betrayed when their fellow citizens did not speak out. Most people will not remain loyal if it means putting themselves in imminent danger. …show more content…
In this terrible prison camp, Jews were only given a small portion of soup and some bread, and they had to do exhausting labor. They lived in a disease-infested environment and the SS officers killed them in gas chambers when they no longer needed them. The theme betrayal is crucial in this book because Elie witnesses it in many forms while he is in the camp. While on a cattle car, he watches in horror as a boy murders his father for a slice of bread. Similarly, he notices when Rabbi Eliahu's son runs ahead of him, leaving him in the dust. Elie promised himself that he would never betray his own father, but when an SS Officer tells him that it is in his best interest to stop giving him bread, he knows it's the truth. A prisoner sharing his rations and looking after others would not have survived for
The Holocaust destroyed many relationships between family members. In this horrific time period, survival meant that one had to abandon their dearest family and friends. In Night, Elie Wiesel lived in this nightmare where the Holocaust tore up the bonds of everyone around him.. He watches separation and abandonment and experiences it as well.
This book interested me because it is a great example of what so many people went through in concentration camps throughout Europe in World War II. So many books have been written about personal accounts of war hardships suffered by the Jews but so few capture the true problems faced by prisoners. The impossible decision between survival and family was a difficult one faced by many during this time. Elie had an unfaltering will to live when his father was alive with him but once his father died the reason for living disappeared. But he once was faced with the decision of helping to keep his father alive or let him die and have an extra ration of food. How can one be stuck with a decision like this and not choose survival? Only true unselfishness can cause you to help someone
The Holocaust was a time where a genocide wiped away Jews in many countries. Many Jews were treated with little to no respect and tolerance. Throughout the book, Night, the author portrayed many examples of inhumanity and humanity involved in the Holocaust. It is important to realize that during the time of the Holocaust, many Jews were not treated like humans.
The Horrific Events of the Holocaust The Holocaust was one of the most notorious acts of genocide in modern history. Wiesel tells the reader about all the these acts that he went through his book Night. During Wiesel’s trials and suffering that he endured through the genocide, Wiesel had to have hope that he would make it out alive and tell his story: “Don’t lose hope...have faith in life, a thousand times faith...help each other.
The holocaust took the lives of six million persons, Jews, Catholics, and homosexuals. Night a memoir by Elie Wiesel was a book about the life as a Jew in the 1940’s. He explains how he suffered during the year that he was there, the camps he was at. The pain that he went thru getting separated from his mother, finding out that her and his sister Tzipora got sent to the crematorium. Life for a Jew in the 1940’s suck. Elie went thru dehumanization because of the way he gets treated in the concentration camps, from getting called dogs to being choosen like cattle.
Because of the dehumanization that results from being imprisoned within a concentration camp, prisoners put their own survival needs over their family’s, transforming themselves into brutes in the face of atrocities and cruel treatment. However, unlike most concentration camp prisoners, Elie escapes the fate of demoralization, as he puts his father's well being above his own, even when his father hampers his own chances of survival. For example, Elie sacrifices his ration of soup, giving it to his dying father, stating, “I took one gulp. The rest was for him” (Wiesel 106). The selflessness Elie maintains, giving up a life sustaining resource to a man whose days are numbered, proves that Elie, despite all hardships, keeps his morals intact.
These prisoners were brought down to a point where animals were being separated from their families, like they were being sold off to never see each other again. This emotionally was awful for Elie because it meant that he would never see the people he spent his whole life with, and you can see that on page 37 where it says “We were withered trees in the heart of the desert.” In the Holocaust camps, the food the Jews were provided was almost worse than some animals. The food alone is such a good example of the dehumanization that occurred in the camps that in an argument it could stand on its own. On page 43 of the text it states “Black coffee, soup, and bread”.
The Holocaust was one of the most horrific and dehumanizing occurrences that the human race has ever endured. It evolved around cruelty, hatred, death, destruction and prejudice. Thousands of innocent lives were lost in Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish population. He killed thousands of Jews by way of gas chamber, crematorium, and starvation. The people who managed to survive in the concentration camps were those who valued not just their own life but others as well. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author of the novel, Night, expressed his experiences very descriptively throughout his book. When Elie was just fifteen years old his family was shipped off
There are people crowded, shoulder to shoulder, expecting a shower and to feel water raining down their bodies. Sighs of relief turn into screams of terror as innocent people are gasping for their last breaths of air inside of the gas chamber. This was a daily occurrence for Jewish and other people involved in the Holocaust. This was just one horrific event of many that had happened to women, men and children. Some of the survivors have used their voice to speak out about their own background during their time spent in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Elie Wiesel, author of the book Night, is one of the many who did so. Wiesel talks about his personal experience and shares his feelings, thoughts and emotions that he went through with others during the Holocaust.
There have been tons of events recorded over the years, but nothing has ever reached the scale of the Holocaust. During the events of the Holocaust, the most deadly time in recorded history, many people, specifically people that practiced the Jewish religion, went into work camps and never came out. In the award winning novel entitled “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie, changes from before his stay in the most infamous camp, Auschwitz, and after he got out alive.
Elie, his father, and the prisoners had to run in the snow more than 40 miles to another concentration camp, deeper in Germany. When they stopped a man, Rabbi Eliahou, asked if Elie and his father if they had seen his son. Elie had and he realized that the Rabbi’s son had “wanted to get rid of his father…to free himself from an encumbrance” (Wiesel 87). They then got on cattle trains that took them to the next concentration camp, Buchenwald. They passed by villages and when people threw bread in, the prisoners began to fight to the death for it. One son began to attack his own father for a piece and killed him, only to be killed the next moment himself. Soon after they arrived in Buchenwald, Eliezer’s father was very weak and sick. A part of Elie felt that if he could get rid of his father he “could use all [his] strength to struggle for [his] own survival” (Wiesel 101). He was very ashamed, even more so when his father died and he felt “free at last” (Wiesel 105).
The actions the Nazis committed during WWII were unbearable for even the strongest people. Prisoners were tortured, starved, and slaughtered just for being Jewish. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, had to endure the atrocities at the age of 15. Wiesel describes these events in his memoir Night. A result of the dehumanization and other cruelty that he faces leads Elie Wiesel to a loss of his faith.
The holocaust is a time where people threw Jews out of their home and started killing them, for no reason. The book Night by Elie Wiesel is about a Jewish family getting sent to a concentration camp. The Wiesel family only knows one house. They get thrown out of their own house, sent on a long journey, just to be set up to die. But, out of a family the family, only 1 survives. But, he has to go through the time of thinking of that his family had died. Family is something many people take advantage of, but Elie now understands that family is important because he lost his Mom and sister at an early age, his father died before he got to say goodbye, and when you lose family members, you have thoughts that there is no reason to do anything.
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
The book Night is about the holocaust as experienced by Elie Weisel from inside the concentration camps. During World War II millions of innocent Jews were taken from their homes to concentration camps, resulting in the deaths of 6 million people. There were many methods of survival for the prisoners of the holocaust during World War II. In the book Night, there were three main modes of survival, faith, family, and food. From the examples in the book Night, faith proved to be the most successful in helping people survive the holocaust.