Response to Threat
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the holocaust experience affects religious identity. Wiesel as a Jew born in Sighet, Romania in 1928 drew upon his personal holocaust experience. His original homeland Sighet was taken by the German army in the early 1944 and taken captive and sent to the Nazi work camps. The camp was not favorable to the Jewish; many were condemned and hanged as punishment. The prisoners endured pain and experienced both psychological and physical threats. The prisoner's responses were clear whether God existed in their suffering. In Wiesel’s Night, he expresses the physical and emotional threats and contends with the issue of God’s existence and God’s silence in the face of suffering, does God exist or not.
Physical …show more content…
It evoked the feelings of sorrow and pity that are a rarity in the camp. The intention of the hanging was to be unspoken threats to the prisoners as Wiesel stated, “May this be a warning and an example to all prisoners.” (659). Such threats made the prisoners continue to keep in line with the Nazi rule. Per Wiesel’s view, the Nazis were too much when they hanged the child. In fact, though they had killed thousands of the prisoners, it did not trouble Wiesel, but the act of killing the young boy overwhelmed him, “But this one, leaning against his gallows- he overwhelmed me.” (659). Wiesel felt that the killing of the boy was beyond his believing in God and felt that death existed everywhere. As a matter of fact, he felt that his joy had been destroyed and all that he believed in, and that night he did not enjoy his soup. It is one of the haunting scenes in the novel.
In Wiesel’s Night, he expresses the physical and emotional threats and contends with the issue of God’s existence and God’s silence in the camp. In this camp, the prisoners were tortured and killed for no reason. These killings were a part of the prisoner’s daily life. Killing the young boy was the most memorable death in the novel. It troubled all the prisoners in the camp who felt as if their God had never existed. Previously, they had strong faith in God, but that day their faith in God died in the noose with the