Resilience In Elie Wiesel's Night

The concentration camps of the Holocaust were home to countless injustices to humanity. Not only were the prisoners starved to the brink of death, but they were also treated as animals, disciplined through beatings nearly every day. Most would not expect an ill-prepared young boy to survive such conditions. Nevertheless, in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Wiesel defies the odds and survives to tell the story. Wiesel considers this survival merely luck, yet luck was not the only factor to come into play: his father had an even greater impact. Prior to their arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel lacked a close relationship with his rather detached father; however, when faced by grueling concentration camp life, the bond between Wiesel and his father ultimately enables Wiesel’s survival.

Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.

Setting (time and place): Early 1940s, during World War Two, Holocaust era. starting in Sighet, Transylvania, and moving throughout concentration camps in Europe.

"Never shall I forget that night the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed," -Elie Wiesel, Night. This quote is one of the quotes from Elie Wiesel's book Night that refers to the title of the book. The title of the book is called Night for reasons such as the fact that the first night was what changed his life, it symbolizes the darkness that encased all of their souls, and it also symbolizes how dark and evil the world was. The title Night has a stronger meaning than what it seems.

In Night, the point Elie Wiesel is making about survival is disheartening, giving examples of what people will do to survive and their every man for themselves mindset. While fighting to survive, numerous animalistic instincts control every aspect of how a person thinks. Moreover, these instincts make you think you must do whatever you can to survive, regardless of who you are harming in the process. Night gives an excellent example of the concept that family and friends do not matter when it comes to life or death, people with this mindset will do nearly anything to live another day. Nevertheless, there are many instances when the survival mindset is strictly internal, pushing them further than they thought they were capable of.

Surviving this horrific holocaust, not only takes a somewhat strong and muscular physical look to pass every roll call or inspection, it also takes an extremely strong and persistent mentality. Eliezer, a character in the novel, Night, possesses such needed traits in order to survive many years in the Holocaust’s hands. Maturity, strength, and determination can be considered some of the few important traits that Eliezer carries throughout the Holocaust until he reached the very end. Eliezer depends on these three important traits to succeed in surviving the gruesome Holocaust itself.

Night begins with the narrator, Elie, talking about Moishe the Beadle, who is described as the “jack-of-all-trades” in a shtibl (Weisel, 21). He then continues by talking about his family. He goes back to talk about his deep conversations with Moishe and their evenings spent together. One day, the foreign Jews of Sighet, where he lives, were expelled. This included Moishe. They were taken away in cattle cars by the Hungarian police. Months past and one day, Elie saw Moishe sitting on a bench near the synagogue. He tells Elie about what happened to him; how he and the other Jews were transported and forced to dig their own graves in the forest. Luckily, Moishe had managed to escape. He had come back to warn the Jews in Sighet of what to come.

I have begun reading Night by Elie Wiesel. This novel is about the events that Elie Wiesel endured as a teenager and harrowing truths about the holocaust. The first chapter was quickly paced and straightforward. A major part of Eli’s day was studying. A man Elie meets named Moishe the Beadle begins to cause him to question his faith and why he prays. The man is definitely different and this later causes the community to miss a warning sign of their impending doom. Moishe the Beadle is a foreign jew and is taken away months earlier than the other jews. He witnesses and miraculously survives a mass murder of foreign jews by faking dead. After returning to Sighet he attempt to warn the residents of what happened but no one believed him. This is important because at this time there were still visas available but since no one could fathom the idea of an attack on a whole population that included millions no one listened. Eli thinks, “Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means?” (8) I liked this explanation in the book because most holocaust books brush over the reason of not leaving when they sensed conflict besides fear and this seemed much more logical in the fact that it does appear to be unbelievable.

In a desperate moment for survival, a person will act in a spontaneous manner to

One day, when Elie returned from the warehouse, he was summoned by the block secretary to go to the dentist. Elie therefore went to the infirmary block to learn that the reason for his summon was gold teeth extraction. Elie, however pretends to be sick and asks, ”Couldn’t you wait a few days sir? I don’t feel well, I have a fever…” Elie kept telling the dentist that he was sick for several weeks to postpone having the crown removed. Soon after, it had appeared that the dentist had been dealing in the prisoners’ gold teeth for his own benefit. He had been thrown into prison and was about to be hanged. Eliezer does not pity for him and was pleased with what was happening

In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel the theme of self preservation and loss of identity plays a critical role in the development of Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) throughout the book. As Wiesel suffers through the tragic events of the holocaust, self preservation proves to be more difficult to keep and losing one’s character seems easy. Wiesel’s identity, faith, and his will to live start to fade as he begins to forms a new character, a character who remains silent. Losing identity means losing the values that makes up a character.

Night, written by Elie Wiesel, tells the terrifying experience in the concentration camps that many Jews were imprisoned in during World War II. Throughout most of the novel, Elie Wiesel tells about how many prisoners, including himself, lost faith in God. During the Holocaust many groups of people, especially Jews, were taken to concentrations camps and treated in the most inhumane way. Many were taken away from their homes, and lost everything that was once their own. In order to survive, many Jews encountered such brutal difficulties. They were worked to death, starved to death, killed, and all because they were Jews. Upon being taken away, many were unaware with what was happening outside their own homes.

Elie Wiesel’s Night is about what the Holocaust did, not just to the Jews, but, by extension, to humanity. The disturbing disregard for human beings, or the human body itself, still to this day, exacerbates fear in the hearts of men and women. The animalistic acts by the Nazis has scarred mankind eternally with abhorrence and discrimination.

Have you ever had to make an instant decision that would significantly impact your life?

“I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself,” - Elie Wiesel. The author of Night, Elie Wiesel, wrote this book to tell the story of what he experienced during the Holocaust. He writes how when he first walked through the gates of what he soon found out was a concentration camp, he was immediately separated from his mother and sisters, and moved to a separate line with his father. He and his father survived the best they could together, until his father could no longer go on and Elie was left to survive on his own with the rest of the prisoners. He survived the beatings, harsh weather, hunger, and overall the concentration camps. He lost his family through the process, but he made it. This makes it very clear that the theme, survival, is important in the book in order to show Elie’s strength and how he fought to stay alive during the duration of time he was held in concentration camps.