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How Does Elie Change In Night

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In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie changes in many profound ways. He had taken in things he witnessed, heard, emotions and perspectives which all shaped him into the person he became after the Holocaust. Eliezer Wiesel is a fourteen-year-old boy living in Sighet, Transylvania during the beginning of World War II. He is a pious boy and wants to study deeper into his religion and read the Talmud. His father, who is an unsentimental man and leader of the Jewish community, believes that he is too young. Out of the many ways that Elie changes, when he survived this historic event, by then he had become a completely different person. He withdrew himself from being pious and hopeful to unfaithful, considerate to selfish and grudgeful and significantly …show more content…

He began by devoting his life to others, mainly his family. However, his experiences caused him to become more selfish and grudgeful. For example, Idek, the kapo in charge of Buna, is known for his unexpected wraths. There was an event where Idek approaches Elie’s father, Shlomo and Elie is a bystander during this situation. He clearly states that the camps have changed him in the sense that after Shlomo received a few blows, Elie held a grudge towards his father rather than Idek. This foreshadowed an even bigger change in Elie’s father in the book. “What’s more, if I felt anger at that moment, it was not directed at the Kapo but at my father. Why couldn’t he have avoided Idek’s wrath? That was what life in a concentration camp had made of me...” (Wiesel 54). Elie knows who had fault in this change of character, if it had to be anything, anyone, it has to be the camp itself. As Elie is slowly becoming less and less humane, his father's strength is lessening also. After the death march where prisoners are forced to WALK 85 miles to the camp in Gleiwitz. During this they are tortured and left to die along the way. This had consisted of many losing their strength along with their lives because of how they were treated by those who had authority. Elie is resisting the urge to do more for himself and less for his father because of his father's state in health. “They didn't give us anything... They said …show more content…

Being consumed by all that he was enduring in the camps resulted in him being just numbers that were tattooed onto him: A-7713, his new identity; just like for everyone else. Being a prisoner had caused the importance and ranking of individuals in communities to die. “I became A-771. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). Prisoners were no longer themselves but instead known for a set of numbers tattooed on their arm. This became THEM. They were nobodies. Following this, the prisoners and their general mental states went left, but Elie acknowledges his change. “I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded – and devoured – by a black flame” (Wiesel 37). His humanity was changing due to him taking in so much and releasing so little. Not only is their race being annihilated but their original lives, physical appearance, families and their identification are also being wiped away. Lastly, when Elie had been released from the concentration camp and resulted to being in a hospital when he became ill, he sees a mirror on the opposite wall from where he is. Once he was able to get up, he looked at himself and stated: "From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me ” (Wiesel 115). With this quote all

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