Elie Wiesel: Holocaust Survivor

The Holocaust was a very terrible time in history over six million Jews perished in concentration camps. Even though in every tragedy there are survivors. Elie Wiesel was a little boy when all of this happened. He experienced all of the terrible things that happened during this time frame. While suffering in the terrible condition of the camp Elie and his father’s relationship goes through a drastic change.

The Holocaust was a deadly event that killed millions of Jews in Germany. Nazis would starve, hit, and most times kill them in result of hate against their religion. Elie Wiesel, one of the most famous Holocaust survivors, was just 15 when he began to witness these happening to his friends and family. When Elie became free, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and became an author. He wrote a book about his traumatic experiences while he was in the camps that tortured and abolished Jews. He left his fenced neighborhood called the Ghettos for Auschwitz where he was tortured and put to work. He marched through cold snow and shivered through long nights, trying to stay with his father. After experiencing the trauma of the Holocaust, Elie changed the relationship he had of God and his father.

Elie says: “I inched my way through the crowd, several SS men rushed to find me, creating such confusion that a number of people were able to switch over to the right-among them my father and I” (96). Here it is clear that Elie knew what he needed to do in that situation and became a brave and unselfish young man. Almost sacrificing himself to save his father and many others from the selection. After Elie has been imprisoned in camp for a while, he finds himself battling the hardships of being imprisoned in the Holocaust. After witnessing countless hangings, including a young boy, “The thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitz and Birkenau, in the crematoria, no longer troubled me” (62).

Elie Wiesel was an adolescent boy who was subjugated to overwhelming difficulties in the Holocaust. He faced many challenges, such as the Jews having to leave their homes and their cherished possessions to go to the death camps. (Night) Another difficulty that Wiesel overcame was the inhumane treatment he received for being a different religion. It was compulsory for Wiesel,

Elie got angry at his father when Idek hit him because Elie implied that his father was not working hard enough. On January 29, 1945, that is when Elie discovered that his father was gone, unlike being upset or sad, Elie felt relieved and did not cry. Lastly, Elie lost his innocence. Throughout the time Elie was in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, Elie witnessed an old lady get gagged, beat up, and tied up because she saw visions of flames and fire. While running, the idea of dying began to fascinate him.

Elie Wiesel, a great person, a great character, and most of all a great survivor. Elie Wiesel or Eliezer as he refers to himself in the book Night is just an amazing person. I just cannot imagine what he went through according to Night and his experiences. One of the most vivid scenes of his book night is when he and the rest of the cap was sent on a long walk to another camp. As it says in the book they were forced to march in the thigh deep snow for days without food or water. I just have so much respect for that guy. For him not to give up everything and say i’m done it is just remarkable. After the holocaust was over Wiesel moved to New York in 1955 and became a U.S. citizen in 1963. He met Marion Rose, also a Holocaust survivor, in New

6 million Jewish people died during the Holocaust and there were 100s of camp heads responsible for killing them. Approximately 900,000 survived and Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 of them. Most of the survivors, however, were liberated by the red army one of those people being Elie Wiesel. Both of these men went through separate conflicts that tore them away from their family and friends. They together dealt with inner and outer struggle, the differences between schindler's reactions, family and conflicts to Elie's are both major and minor.

Once the men had arrived at Buchenwald, Elie lost his father and hoped to not find him, leaving himself feeling ashamed. Later on, Elie’s father was not given food, due to being sick and told it was a waste, so Elie gave his father his ration but was only doing it grudgingly, not willingly. Furthermore, on January 29, 1945, Elie discovers his father is gone, but he doesn't shed a tear and is even relieved that he’s free from a

Night by Elie Wiesel was published in 1955 and narrates the author’s personal experiences during the Holocaust. Young Elie Wiesel recounts his struggles as he was forced into various concentration camps through his writing. The events that are written in Wiesel’s Night exemplify the brutality evident during the 1940’s Nazi Era. Eliezar Wiesel was born on on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, now Romania. He attended a nearby yeshiva, a Jewish institution that studies traditional religious texts, until he was fifteen years old.

The suffering started getting unbearable, to the point that they’d rather lie down and possibly not wake up, then to keep going. When the Russians started attacking the camp to save the Jews, the Jews were forced, by the Germans, to go on a long walk to Gleiwits. When they arrived in Gleiwits, the father started dying and starvation and aching started setting in. They ended up getting on a train to Buchenwald but the father ended up dying on the train. So, Elie ended up getting away but now he was by himself in the

Elie and his family were removed from their home in Sighet, Romania in the spring of 1944. From there, they were transferred to many concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Buna, over the course of the following year. He was fifteen years old when he struggled through the persecution plagued upon them by the Nazis. Throughout his time at the camps, he witnessed many atrocities, including murder by weapons, fire, and hanging, that threatened to strip him of his morals and tore apart his faith in God. By the time Elie and his fellow survivors were liberated by the Americans in April, 1945, Elie had lost both his parents and his siblings to the concentration camps

Elie’s father died of dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion in Buchenwald, only weeks before the liberating army came to the gates of the camp. After the liberation, Elie described how their first act as free men was to throw themselves upon the provisions for such were the inhumane savages they had become.

Elie Wiesel—a Holocaust survivor and award-winning human rights activist—passionately gave his speech, “The Perils of Indifference,” while in the White House on April 12, 1999. The speech was part of the Millennium Lecture series, which was hosted by President Bill Clinton and his wife. Mrs. Hilary Clinton introduced Elie as well, saying: "It was more than a year ago that I asked Elie if he would be willing to participate in these Millennium Lectures...I never could have imagined that when the time finally came for him to stand in this spot and to reflect on the past century and the future to come, that we would be seeing children in Kosovo crowded into trains, separated from families, separated from their homes, robbed of their childhoods, their memories, their humanity." Indeed, the events in Kosovo created an effective environment that Wiesel could use to tell the audience about some of his experiences during the Holocaust and to communicate why humanity must fight against the evil of indifference.

Elie experienced many changes, as a person while he was in Auschwitz. Before Elie was sent to Auschwitz, he was just a small naive child that new very little

Page 34, “…Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.” From this one quote you can most certainly tell that Elie has been living through some extremely tough times in his life right now. You can also tell that just being a part of the concentration camp and knowing that if you don’t die there is a good chance that one of your family members or friends will, it will always be permanently engraved in Elies’ memories. And this has definitely had a huge impact on his life “He was not alone in having lost faith during those days of selection,” Page 76. Elie is talking about the Rabbi losing his faith when he states that the Rabbi is not alone and Elie himself is also losing faith. The selection was when the Germans and doctors looked at how the prisoner’s were health wise and if they where unhealthy they would kill them and put them in the crematoria’s. This, however, was tough for many of the prisoners because most of them where starving and unhealthy, a lot of the people didn’t pass the selections, but those who did