...The Belief and Denial of the Holocaust Between 1933 and 1945, an event took place that would greatly affect the world forever. Jews, homosexuals, and even Jehovah’s Witnesses were stripped of their rights, mistreated continuously, and forced to complete hard manual labor. This horrendous event led by Adolf Hitler is known as the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an event in which “Jews were separated from their communities and persecuted; and finally they were treated as less than human beings and murdered” (What Was The Holocaust?). Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany and the soldiers who were set out to annihilate anyone who did not follow social normalities. Even though there are various pictures and documents in existence showing proof...
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...How does our environment affect us? For years, doctors and scientists have observed that the environment that people live in have major affects on their health. However, the environment can also affect a person’s mental well-being. Sadly, often times, people may be placed in environments that they have no control over. Perhaps the most iconic example of this is the Holocaust. The concentration camps altered the behaviors and beliefs of those in them. Elie Wiesel explains these consequences of the environment through his personal story in the book Night and his speech The Perils of Indifference. Another great example of these changes that people undergo in specific situations is in the movie Life is Beautiful. These examples justify the idea that the environment in which a person is placed helps to shape their personality,...
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...Eliezer’s Character Change The Holocaust was a devastating time in history where Jews were forced into concentration camps and worked, starved, or burned to death. One of the most influential writers who lived during this time period was Elie Wiesel. Wiesel’s Night is a memoir depicting the journey of a young boy, Eliezer, who experienced the Holocaust at a very young age. The Nazis occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, and Eliezer and his family are deported to a concentration camp. While at several different concentration camps, Eliezer faces a variety of different situations, and he learns to adapt to his circumstances. As his father becomes weaker and weaker throughout the memoir, Elie starts to develop mixed emotions for him. During...
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..."Night" by Elie Wiesel is a terrifying account of the Holocaust during World War II. Throughout this book we see a young Jewish boy's life turned upside down from his peaceful ways. The author explores how dangerous times break all social ties, leaving everyone to fight for themselves. He also shows how one's survival may be linked to faith and family. The novel starts out in a small highly Jewish populated Hungarian town named Sighet. The people's lives and community somewhat revolve around each other and religion (Judaism). More importantly we see immense care and concern among the citizens; they all help one another and are true to their similar beliefs and values. Eliezer's life starts out revolving around God, as he goes on his journey studying the cabbala and other forms of Jewish religious texts. Initially Eliezer's belief is a product of Jewish mysticism that God is everywhere and that nothing exists without God, and in the start his faith in God is absolute. During the Holocaust, things change irreparably. The peaceful calm Jewish community that Eliezer once grew up with was shattered into a realm of chaos and selfishness. Eliezer believes that if all the prisoners were to unite to oppose the cruel that the Nazis inflicted upon them, then maybe he could understand the Nazi menace as an evil abnormality, but instead he sees that the Holocaust exposes the selfishness, evil, and cruelty of everybody; not only the Nazis, but also his fellow Jews, and even himself. I...
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...Wiesel’s Changes of Faith The Holocaust brought about many hardships and created severe adversity for its victims that may have created experiences ultimately too traumatic that transformed their lives for years to come, either through starvation and labor in the concentration camps or execution and incineration in the extermination camps. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tells the story of himself as a young Jewish boy born in Romania, who in 1944, was forced into ghettos with the rest of the Jewish citizens and later deported, along with his father, to the Nazi’s largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. While living through this day-to-day horrifying basis, Elie begins to live with overwhelming fear and total alienation, as well as his increasing loss of faith on God and whether God is even existent or not for His lack of participation in trying to help the Jews. Although Elie manages to survive his long and frightening journey through both labor and death camps, his faith was never at the high-most air-reaching level as it dramatically changed throughout the course of the novel because of his disturbing experiences in witnessing cremated human beings, executions, and the going through the loss of his entire family. Prior to being deported to the camps, Elie’s faith was extremely high as he was well-established with his studies in mysticism and the cabbala and his great involvement with religion through prayers. Elie is finding a great interest in wanting to...
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...stronger growing faith and untouched humanity ideas during an evil historic event like the Holocaust? Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, will answer this question. Throughout history humanity has faced numerous tragic event caused either by nature or human beings, both of God’s creations. The Holocaust, which means “sacrifice by fire”, began in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. During the Holocaust the Jews were the most affected. The Nazis killed eleven million Jews, almost two-thirds of all the Jewish population living in Europe. Jews were not the only ones the Holocaust targeted; Gypsies, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were also victims of Hitler’s plan. In recent years, events like The Twin Towers terrorist attack in 2001 and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami have brought enormous suffering to the world, suffering that can somehow be compared to the one lived during the Holocaust. Continuing is the analysis of Elie Wiesel’s horrific experiences during the Holocaust. Did these experiences affect his faith? Was his perception of humanity ideas impacted? The book Night starts describing Elie’s faith as one indestructible. As young as he was he had deep knowledge of Jewish mysticism studies. Elie believed in God; a God of love and unlimited power. He was told that God is the master creator of all world’s wonders and that these wonders where the emanation of the divine world. Elie concluded that if God was the creator of everything in the physical world and God is a God...
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...is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors [...].” In Night, Elie Wiesel details his experiences in the Holocaust, from living in the Ghettos as a young Jewish boy who feared the Lord. Who was transported to concentration camps, and became just a number who questioned life. To finally, being liberated at the age of 16 and starting his life over as a dead man walking. During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and his peers experienced dehumanization that changed Elie’s outlook, identity, and attitude in life. Arriving at Auschwitz, Elie experiences dehumanization for the first time. “A truck drew close and unloaded its hold. Small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes...children thrown into the flames” (Wiesel 32). Elie sees the small children being thrown into the crematorium and starts to see what is really going on. Another instance Elie...
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...In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when soldiers were throwing dead bodies off the train. “I woke from my apathy only when two men approached my father, I threw myself on his body. He was cold. I slapped him. I rubbed his hands, crying.”(Wiesel 99). Elie desperately tries to wake his father up to prevent him from being thrown out by grave diggers. Slowly Elie begins to lose his faith in God and begins doubting his existence. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity are revealed. A recurring theme in Night is how inhumanity can leave permanent wounds on a psyche of a person. It affects the person’s mind and body maliciously. “ One day when I was able to get up, i decided to look at myself in the mirror… From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me.” (Wiesel 115) In this quote he refers to himself as a “corpse” which is usually associated with a thin, empty, shell of a human. As Shakespeare called it, a “mortal coil”. As Elie grew more accustom to the camp's atmosphere and figured that the brunt of it was over. That security was stripped away by something even more disturbing ¨ Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ¨For gods sake where is god?¨ And from within...
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...The Boys in the Boat is a book written by Daniel James Brown about the 1936 United States men’s rowing team. This story, in particular, shows the journey to the Olympics in the viewpoint of Joe Rantz. Night is a book written by Elie Wiesel about his experience in through the Holocaust. It shows his journey through different German concentration camps and how his personal life shifted. Joe Rantz and Elie Wiesel demonstrate resilience by bouncing back from all the turmoil they’ve been through for a purpose and both of them not letting losing their families stop them. Joe Rantz didn’t let anything or anyone get in his way from being successful because of the ideals and goals the crew and himself had. For example, “Joe realized that he and the...
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...sense of unity. But the continuous agony inflicted by the Holocaust stripped the prisoners of their human compassion. Apathy replaced states of sympathy and empathy, and desensitization enveloped the camps. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night shows how desensitization leads to a state of indifference towards violence enacted upon others through the use of man vs. society conflict, situational irony, and imagery. The consistent nature of the conflicts between a prisoner and the twisted society around them creates an indifference to the violence brought upon others. For instance, on the train...
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...The Book of Job According to Gutiérrez and Wiese Elie Wiesel and Gustavo Gutiérrez analyses’ of the book of Job are paralleling at times yet very different throughout their pieces. Since Gustavo is a Christian and Wiesel is Jewish, their religious beliefs effect the way they analyze the book of Job. Another aspect that affects Elie’s and Gustavo’s writing pieces are their life experiences. In the book of Job, Job is really tested by God and has to overcome many struggles in his life given to him by Satan. Elie and Gustavo related to Job because they too have had many life struggles and questioned their faith the way Job did. Faith and personal experience is what allows Eli and Gustavo to find the important lesson they believe are worth explaining. The similarities between these two writers are the way they relate to Job through their life experiences. They are differences in their analysis are their religious beliefs. A similarity that I found between both writers was the way they feel about talking to God when they are going through a life struggle. To me this is very understandable and all humans do this. What separates God’s true followers are the ones who can get over the certain life struggle and still trust in God. Throughout this paper I will go into greater detail what lessons the authors draw from the Book of Job and how their analyses reflect their respective religious traditions. At the end I will determine whose take on Job was more convincing. Job goes through...
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...Though humanity has seen many trials and dangers, few events in the course of human history reflect the absolute evil that mankind can offer—one such being the Holocaust. The Holocaust is one of the few examples of the true, unadulterated calamities that humans have produced. Their baser, evil nature comes to light through the terrible things the Nazis and the rest of the world did to the Jewish community. Many reputable articles, as well as the infamous memoir “Night” by the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, depict the pain and terror the Jews underwent during their time in the concentration camps, which would then affect them not only immediately but also for generations afterward. These articles and the prominent memoir “Night” all illustrate...
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...In the book Night Elie Wiesel has a strong faith in God at the beginning of the book.Wiesel has developed this faith by his studies in mysticism and Kabbalah he seems very eager to learn more . For instance, on page four he says “One day I asked my father to find me a master who could guide me in my studies of Kabbalah. ‘You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism.’”Wiesel’s loss of confidence in God who he once strongly believed in is thanks to the inhumane way people were treated, his lack of basic life necessities, and all the losses Wiesel experienced during the camp and the Holocaust in general. One reason Wiesel lost faith was because he did not believe...
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...Appearance vs. Reality In the novel Night (1956), Elie Wiesel illustrates the horror that he faces through the Holocaust. Wiesel’s drive to get out of the concentration camp with his father alive causes him to be directed through all of these challenges. When it seems that everything is lost time after time again, he starts to lose himself and his humanity. Wiesel’s detailed descriptions of the Jews denying their inevitable truth that had shown right in front of them is also later shown that not only did the Jewish community, not face their own reality, however Elie Wiesel finds it hard to face his reality through this tough time. The play Oedipus Rex (420) by (Sophocles) also demonstrates the tragedy of how sensitive our mentality can...
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...stab to the heart, one more to hate. One less reason to live” (Wiesel 109). Countless victims of the Holocaust gradually lost the desire to live due to the cruel acts of Hitler’s regime. Even after WWII, victims still would cling to the fear of enduring the abuse of the Nazis. Several victims wish these memories would vanish from their subconscious, but instead Elie Wiesel took the liberty of writing Night, which is a memoir that valiantly recounts his experience as a Holocaust survivor. His autobiographical account of the concentration camps grimly illustrates the agony felt by the victims and exposes to the public how the actions of the Nazi regime would mentally, physically, and emotionally affect the...
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