Something I found myself wondering while reading Night by Elie Wiesel, was how much the narrator , Wiesel, had changed from the beginning of the novel to the end? In what ways has his identity been stripped of him, warped and destroyed until he was barely recognizable by the end of the book? In the beginning, Wiesel is a young boy, around the age of thirteen, living in a village called Sighet with his family. He is devoutly religious and wants, more than anything else to study the Kabbala and his Jewish faith. While meeting with a man in town, Moishe the Beadle, and having discussions about his beliefs, he continues to pursue religious study. However, in 1942 Moishe and all of the other foreign Jews of Sighet are taken by German soldiers …show more content…
He describes the horrific killing of all of the other Jews and only escaped because the Nazis had shot him in the leg, leaving him for dead. Much to his dismay, nobody in the village believes him. Despite his pleas for the other Jews to hear what he’s saying, they all think that he’s lying or looking for sympathy. Wiesel is one of these people and more or less ignores what Moishe has to say and, as stated on page eight, “devotes himself to his studies.” But all of this changes in the spring of 1944 when the German soldiers arrive in Sighet. Soon after gaining the trust of the people, the Nazis begin placing restrictions on them and later, segregate the Jews into ghettos. It’s only then that many of the Jews begin to realize the danger they have been placed in due to the German soldiers being there. After some time in the ghetto, Wiesel’s life truly spirals from his control when his family is sent to the Birkenau Concentration Camp. From there, prisoners are sorted by gender, separating them from family and other loved ones, and abused by guards and other prisoners. They travel back and forth between Auschwitz and Birkenau for a while, in the process, they are stripped of their identities by having their heads shaven and being forced to dress in identical clothes, as well as being referred to as the number …show more content…
Whether it be their belongings, their clothes, hair, family, and even their humanity. Wiesel, his father, and the other prisoners try to hold onto what’s left of their dignity until it becomes impossible. They are humiliated daily by the guards by being forced to live in filth and referred to as dogs. Wiesel remarks on page 36: “In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.” This quote shows us just how dehumanized Wiesel felt in the camp. The soldiers had taken every part of their humanity by treating the Jews like slaves and animals. It was through this stripping of Wiesel’s humanity that took who he was as a person from his identity. The killing of one’s body and soul can undoubtedly lead to the demolition of a person’s identity. When he is separated from his mother and sisters and sees the horrendous crimes being inflicted upon the Jewish people, Wiesel contemplates suicide as they walk past the flames to which the Jews were thrown. This is clearly not something that he would have considered before, so you can already see how the conditions of the camp have changed him. He describes the permanent emotional scars the first night left on him on page 34: “Never shall I forget that night, the first
Wiesel exemplified the dehumanization of the Jewish prisoners in Night. He showed the readers a personal view of the Nazi's treatment to the prisoners. They lost their possessions,
In the first half of the book Night, Elie Wiesel has changed from a devoted and faithful young boy to the same boy just shifted to a scared boy suffering in a camp. When in the ghetto, Elie and his big sisters were able to go to a safe shelter while Elie's parents and youngest sibling stayed. Elie and his big sisters stayed. Wiesel thinks [“naturally we refused to separate”(20).] Here it is clear that Elie is starting to shift from an innocent boy to a disturbed, tortured young man.
Throughout the memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel, the main character’s faith changed drastically. In the beginning of the memoir, Elie is curious about his religion and wants to know more about it. By the end of the memoir, Elie has lost all his faith in God and struggles to understand why “he” would do something like this. As the story unfolds, Eliezer’s belief in God changes.
First, the reader views Wiesel’s personality changes as a result of life in Auschwitz. Perhaps the most obvious change is his steadily increasing disinterest of religion. Before his internment, Wiesel demonstrates a growing interest in the religion of his parents. During the day, he studied Talmud, a legal commentary on the Torah, or the Jewish Ten Commandments. At night, he would worship at the synagogue, “to weep over the
Elie Wiesel Character Analysis Essay In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his experiences and the affects that they had on him during the Holocaust. Throughout the novel the reader gets to see Elie’s transformation from a religious, sweet little boy to the shell of a man that was left after his experience. During Elie’s traumatic experiences we can observe him going through several changes both physically and mentally.
Wiesel was still young when he was forcibly sent to a death camp. He was forcibly separated from his mother and sister at Auschwitz whom he never saw again. Luckily, he was able to stay in contact with his father throughout the book Night. He helped his father a lot, sometime giving up his food or encouraging him to prove he is fit to work because if the SS soldier found you were no help or weak you were most likely to be killed. “I was terribly hungry, yet i refused to touch it. I was
This is shown in the memoir as Wiesel starts to question his faith and what he believes in, which is illustrated when he says “My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man” (Wiesel 66). This quote takes place during Rash Hashanah, in which he participates in but not only has he questioned his faith, but he has lost his belief in God’s goodness and he truly believed that God would not help them. He even later goes on to say that man is stronger than god which is a huge shift in his beliefs. This example shows exactly how much Wiesel’s outlook changed. Before getting sent to the concentration camps, his beliefs were all he had. His belief and faith in God was very strong and the memoir even starts out with him wanting to practice Kabbalah- the study of Jewish mysticism. This is key because now, we see him with completely different views on God, because as he went from camp to camp and saw death after death he felt slowly God die in his heart. He no longer believed in God, this even though he still said prayers of desperation to the God he no longer believed. Wiesel clearly illustrates the idea of dehumanization changing what someone used to believe because of how they view the world after going through these horrific
One of Adolf Hitler’s promises was to eliminate the Jewish race. In order for this to happen, you must first see people as less than human. Once you have accomplished this task, the mass murder of millions of people becomes easy. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the multitude of times he was seen as less than human, and how this affected his life while in concentration camps. The dehumanization of the prisoners not only crushes them, it causes them to become desensitized and often see each other as less than human.
The emotional connection Wiesel has to the injustice and inhumane acts from other people being a survivor from the Holocaust
After nearly two years of misery, a young boy finally saw the first ray of hope on the horizon; the Americans had finally arrived, and the Nazis were gone. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau, one of Hitler’s concentration camps. Wiesel was one of the minority of Jews to survive the Holocaust during World War II. His family did not make it through with him, and this had lasting effects. Wiesel’s identity changed completely during his experiences in Auschwitz; he lost his faith in God and he became indifferent to his survival and the survival of his family members. Despite these hardships, however, he ultimately became a stronger person than he was before.
Wiesel and his fellow jews first experience dehumanization when the Hungarian police burst into their homes in Sighet. They were not allowed to keep any items that had meaning to them “A Jew no longer had the right to keep in his house gold, jewels, or any objects of value” (Wiesel 8). The process of stripping them of their identities continues as they get to the concentration camps. When Eliezer becomes a member of Block 17, the first thing to go was his name. SS officers lined up prisoners and Eliezer says “I became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (Wiesel 31). Eliezer refers to himself as a number now rather than his name. As the Jews are stripped of their identity, they are constantly viewed as nothing.
Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.
The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own
There are many vices that are taken up exclusively by Humans. Other animals don’t think about wiping out entire races or species just for kicks, most species don’t have the urge to attempt genocide or even turning on their own kin, but humans do. Elie Wiesel was a holocaust survivor whose ghastly year at the Auschwitz death camp was shared with the world by way of his book, “Night.”
Although this fear is always present, within the first couple days all the people help in concentration camps quickly become succumbed to this feeling. After living in the camps for a few days the people come to the realization that, “no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate-still unknown” (21). This shows how even though there were people of higher and lower statuses, nothing mattered once inside the camp each person was just a person, maybe even less. Additionally, this quote evokes a sense of fear of the unknown with the people have no idea about where they are destined to go. Wiesel uses strong descriptive language to better illustrate his journey throughout the novel, giving the reader the ability to really understand the detrimental conditions the people were subject to. Since this whole novel is a memoir and is a true story, it has had a significant impact on our society. It allows people to never forget how many lives were lost during the Holocaust and how many lives were forever changed. This is crucial to our world history because now this book, this story, will forever be remembered and recognized as one that truly happened in real