Night, By Elie Wiesel

"Night" is a novel written by Eliezer Wiesel. The book is about the Holocaust, the extermination of Jews by the Germans. Eliezer was the only one out of his family that survived the Holocaust. Three reoccurring symbols define and clarify Eliezer Wiesel's struggle to maintain faith in his benevolent God. Night is the first reoccurring symbol.

The horrible accounts of the holocaust are vividly captured by Elie Wiesel in Night, an award winning work by a Holocaust survivor. It describes his time in the Holocaust and helps the reader fully understand the pain he went through. In the text, Elie continuously mentions how he is losing his faith to god. It is evident that he has nearly, if not completely lost his faith during the events of the holocaust. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel’s faith changes because of the absence of God, the dehumanization of the prisoners, and all of the death that surrounds him.

The books Night, by Elie Wiesel, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, by John Boyne are two intriguing books by themselves. However, when you put them together you gain an improved perspective about the Holocaust. You also get see how people were affected by it, how they reacted to it, and what their opinions were about it. These two books contain many similarities and differences, but they go so well together.

Paragraph four - During the book Elie started to doubt God. ( man vs God )

Imagine being cruelly tortured, starved, and worked to death everyday. In his autobiographical novel, Night, Eliezer Wiesel shares his experiences of being a Jew during the rule of Adolf Hitler, an anti-semite. When Hitler proposed the Final Solution, the eradication of all Jews, Eliezer and his family were forcefully taken to a concentration camp called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although Eliezer survived, he lost his family and identity due to traumatizing horrors of camp. Over the course of the novel, Eliezer’s actions and words have demonstrated that he changed from being religious and caring to faithless and selfish.

Night is an account of the Holocaust and persecution of the Jewish people, written by Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel wrote, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky” (Night). Remembering the events of the Holocaust and the atrocities that occurred are a major theme of the book . The events of the Holocaust were unforgettable to Elie Wiesel and even on the first day, he saw children being burned. Throughout the book this is not the only atrocity that he saw.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, showed the devastation of Eliezer’s childhood and illustrated the loss of innocence through the evil of others. Elie Wiesel expressed to us that one’s own faith and beliefs can be challenged through torture and ongoing suffering. The novel, Night, allowed the reader to witness the change in Eliezer from one of an innocent child who strongly adhered to his faith in God into a person who questioned not only his faith and God but of himself as well. The cruelty is shown to him while in the concentration camp forced him to wonder if there was a God and if so why would he put him and the others through such torture. Through his suffering, Eliezer’s beliefs dramatically and negatively changed his faith in God and compelled him to experience a transformative relationship with his father.

In a Concentration Camp survival was next to impossible. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is a survivor of the holocaust who doesn’t have much of a relationship with his father. He has always felt that he was never important to his father and that his father cared more about the community than his own family. When Eliezer and his father are forced to count on each other, it’s a slow process for them to finally have a father-son relationship. Without each other they wouldn’t have survived for as long as they did and Eliezer would have lost all hope. A major theme in this story is how Eliezer and his father come together and build a relationship amidst their circumstances.

There are many important themes and overtones to the book Night, by Eliezer Wiesel. One of the major themes from the book includes the protagonist, and author of his memoire, Elie Wiesel’s ever changing relationship with God. An example of this is when Moche the Beadle asked Elie an important question that would change his life forever, as the basis of his passion and aptitude for studying the ancient texts and teachings of Judaism, “When Moche the Beadle asked Elie why he prayed, Elie couldn 't think of an answer that truly described his faith, and thought, "a strange question, why did I live, why did I breathe?" (Wiesel 14).

During World War II, the Jewish race was one of the most persecuted of all the minorities harassed by Hitler and the Third Reich, and a day to day basis, Jews across Europe lived in constant fear, wondering if today would be their last. Especially in cities close to the expanding Nazi empire, there was no telling when their last breath would come. In the memoir, the closely knitted town of Sighet is controlled by the Germans, leaving anyone of Jewish descent to obey their commands in total fear of their personal safety. Elie Wiesel describes this genuine fear when he wakes up a close friend of his father, “‘Get up sir, get up!...You're going to be expelled from here tomorrow with your whole family, and all the rest of the Jews…’ Still half asleep he stared at me with terror-stricken eyes.”

Forty-two years after entering the concentration camp for the first time, Elie Wiesel remarked, “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope” (Nobel Lecture 1). This means a lot from someone who endured almost two years of the terror in the WWII concentration camps. During these two years, Elie endured the sadness of leaving his former life and faith behind, the pain of living off of scraps of bread, and the trepidation of the “selections”, where he almost lost his father. He watched the hanging of innocent people, was beat by Kapos and guards time after time, and marched in a death march right after having a foot surgery. Through all of this, he survived because he remained hopeful. Hope was all the Jewish people

I feel like the book Night lets off a very sad a depressing mood. The setting of this book is a various amount of concentration camps that Elie and his dad go to. The main central idea of Night is to explain the experiences in the Holocaust. I personally think that this book is a good book for young adults and not kids because it uses some language and it’s very descriptive.

Often, the theme of a novel extends into a deeper significance than what is first apparent on the surface. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the theme of night and darkness is prevalent throughout the story and is used as a primary tool to convey symbolism, foreshadowing, and the hopeless defeat felt by prisoners of Holocaust concentration camps. Religion, the various occurring crucial nights, and the many instances of foreshadowing and symbolism clearly demonstrate how the reoccurring theme of night permeates throughout the novel.

In the concentration camp Eliezer can’t understand why God allows so much death and destruction, and even though he is angry and questions God he never loses his faith. Although Eliezer never has his questions answered he never loses his faith. Eliezers evolving relationship with God is a major source of character development for himself.

Eliezer went from being extremely religious to questioning in anger about God’s ways. He shows that only in the lowest moments does he turn his back on God, yet in times of need he prays towards God. By the end of the book, Eliezer is still undecided; he is no longer devout,