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Elie Wiesel Reflection

Decent Essays

When learning about the Holocaust, most are deprived of being able to understand the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of the millions of Jews; however, Elie Wiesel gives this opportunity through the telling of his personal experience. After ten years of silence, Elie Wiesel recounts his personal experiences of the Holocaust and retells the horrific details of the events he witnessed in his honest, eye-opening memoir Night. Taken at a young age, Elie Wiesel is transported to Auschwitz; at this concentration camp, Wiesel is separated from his mother and younger sister, whom he would never see again. During his years in the concentration camp, Wiesel and his father worked long exhausting hours every day. After a forty-two mile trip from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz in the snow and bitter cold, Elie Wiesel watches the slow death of his father by malnutrition and a harsh beating from the Nazis. Three months later American forces liberate the camp, freeing Wiesel. One of the most important memoirs one can read and a true inspiration, Night deserves to be read by everyone. In Night, Elie Wiesel helps with the understanding and teaching of the Holocaust better than most textbooks, which can only provide facts and dates; however, Wiesel tells the story in a way that makes the reader feel that they are next to him, witnessing and experiencing every tragic event as he does. Referring to a child being executed in front of the prisoners ordered to watch, Elie Wiesel writes, “For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. . . He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed” (Wiesel 62). With the way that Elie Wiesel uses his details, the reader feels as if they are standing with Wiesel helplessly watching this young child suffer as his life slowly vanishes. Explaining running in the death march, Elie Wiesel writes, “I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much. If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about, I could feel myself as two entities- my body and me. I hated it” (Wiesel 81). Because of

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