...On a similar account, Elie Wiesel's Night is the night, when he lay down as an innocent child without thinking of the horror that awaited him the next morning when he arrived at the camp. A night that swallowed millions of lives and that, when it was over, it would never allow those who survived it to stop thinking about the darkness. On the other hand is the night, which protects the criminals, who are considered immune by that silence that no one breaks to betray them. The night is the guilty silence of many people, the silence that was essential for the horror to reach such magnitude. It also refers to the night of the conscience, not only of criminals or silent spectators but also of the victims themselves, who in many cases had to act...
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...Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the story of the Holocaust, the mass genocide of the Jewish people and important event in WWII. The memoir Night begins in the polish town of Sighet. The story is About Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy whose family gets deported to the concentration camp with other Jews from his town. Upon arrival his Mother and Sister, Tzipora are separated and executed by the Nazis in the Auschwitz death camp. Following that, after months of work, with the advancing allied front, the prisoners were forced to march all night to the Gleiwitz concentration camp. As Elie’s story continues, after being stuffed inside a camp barrack for 3 days without food or water, the Prisoners were let out for a selection, Elie’s Father was chosen to...
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...Can literature help us remember the past? Night, Perils of Indifference, and Acceptance Speech all have things in common. They can connect to different themes and they connect to one another. Literature has a big part in this world and it helps us remember past events, just like the Holocaust. In Elie Wiesel’s Acceptance Speech he says, “Who would allow such crime to be committed? How could the world remain silent?” This kinda ties back to theme 3 - breaking the silence on cruel acts is a way to break the cycle of repetition. He’s asking why would the world remain silent? He wanted people to break the silence when the crime was being committed. In this speech it also says “one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death.” And this kinda connects to the prompt because it’s saying that you,...
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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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...throughout Night. Eliezer Wiesel presents the Jewish faith in a moment of extreme darkness however, what gives him the courage and strength to continue to live is his connection with religion and his relationship with God. Initially Elie shows strong devotion, then becomes disillusioned with God’s power, and ultimately redefines the position God holds in his life. In the beginning, Elie Wiesel’s relationship with God in Night shows strong devotion. Wiesel made spirituality inherent to all activities, wished to spend his life focused around Judaism, and devoted all his free time and energy on religious studies. Wiesel believed that religion was a basic survival need, showing that he followed his religion instinctively. When asked why he prayed, Wiesel couldn’t think of a proper answer and thought, “…strange question, why did I live, why did I breathe?”. Wiesel maintained confidence in religion as the situation deteriorated. Wiesel and his people gave thanks to God for survival, keeping hope that God was putting them through a test of hardships what would keep them alive if they kept their faith. When they had arrived at Auschwitz, they thanked God and were able to regain their confidence because, “Here was a sudden release from the terrors of the previous nights”. Wiesel thanked God for the little things that helped him because he wanted a sense of protection and clung to the belief that God watched over them and helped them survive the challenges he faced. When Wiesel’s new shoes...
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...“He was tortured, Remained behind confinement, Remained silent, Death found three gallows, Three black ravens aimed at us, Three prisoners in chains. All eyes were pale, The shadow took his place, Three chairs were tipped over, Silence on the horizon, The two men were hanging.” These are the words of a blackout poem created out of a page of text from the book ‘Night’. The book night is all about a Elie Wiesel's experience in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.He never forgot about his experiences because he lived through it. But we shouldn't forget the Holocaust either. It is important to remember the Holocaust so history doesn’t repeat itself and to bring awareness to current situations. The Holocaust is a major part of...
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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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... May 1, 2011 Major Works Data Sheet- Night Title: Night Author: Elie Wiesel Date of Publication: 1958 Genre: autobiography, memoir Historical information about period of publication: World War II, and the Holocaust, ended in April 1945 when the liberating Allied armies came through the conquered territories in Nazi Europe. Night describes 16 year old Elie’s loss of faith in God, humanity, family and morality in general. Elie, therefore, vowed to not speak of his experience in Auschwitz, Buna or Buchenwald (or any event between 1943 and 1945, from the beginning of the occupation of Hungary to Germany’s liberation in 1945) for ten years, until he had time to internalize this dramatic loss, and regain his faith and possession of his memory and life. In 1954, after realizing that even less than ten years after the end of the Holocaust, the world was already forgetting and Jews were abandoning their roots, the time had come to testify and justify to the world that Hitler had not succeeded. Biographical Information about the author: Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet Romania, where his memoir Night begins. In his childhood (up to the Nazi occupation of Romania) his father encouraged his study of the Torah, other Judaic texts and other literary works. As described in the beginning of Night, Elie was also curious about the realm of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. From 1944 to 1945, Elie and his family were subjected to the Nazi terror...
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...Night Essay Prompt 1 Why did Elie Wiesel choose to rename the book “Night” rather than keep the previous title “The World Remained Silent” for his story of his Holocaust experience? The both fit the book well but Night has a more figurative meaning compared to “The World Remained Silent” which is very literal and you don’t have to really think about why the title is what it is. I think Night is a much better choice of a title because it has multiple meanings of what it could be and the reader can decide and choose their own interpretation on it rather than having a set meaning which removes a lot of the effect of having a title that the reader can create their own meaning for and have it mean something to them rather than it being just a title....
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...In Wiesel's "Peace Prize Speech" he talks about survivors of the holocaust saying: "This honor (Nobel Peace Prize) belongs to all the survivors" (Wiesel 118). For Wiesel, to give away such a reward verbally the "survivors" must of survived a disaster. The reason for the quote is to remember and not let the memory die.This is one of the differences in the 2 works, remembering. The other work is the poem "Never shall I forget" this poem talks about the horrific sight of the death camp Auschwitz. As the author Wiesel, was approaching up to the camp by train he describes the sight saying: "Never shall I forget the small faces whose bodies turned to smoke/ Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God" (Wiesel 3-6). In essence, Wiesel watched as babies were burned, therefore it caused Wiesel to not believe in a God. As he keeps watching his faith turns to nothing at all. In conclusion the "Nobel Peace Prize" speech and Wiesel's "Never shall I forget" poem have different messages. The message of the speech is to remember, to not let the same happen again. The message of "Never shall I forget" poem is witnessing any type of crime against humanity could cause you to question your...
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...“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.” (34) After reading Elie Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust in his book Night and watching the movie Life is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, I determined that, the book, Night has the greatest impact on the reader. Based on the mood and tone of the two stories, the amount of details, and the main characters of the stories, I believe that Wiesel’s account of the Holocaust leaves the reader more impacted than Benigni’s story of the same event. In Elie Wiesel’s literary memoir Night, which he wrote in the nineteen-fifties, after his ten years of vowed silence in respect for those who lost their lives in the Holocaust, Wiesel...
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...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...
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...Elie Wiesel’s Loss of Innocence There comes a time in one’s life where a tragic event results in the loss of innocence and an increase in knowledge. Unfortunately this is one of life’s few promises. Some experience this ablution a lot sooner than they should. In children who survived the holocaust in concentration camps, their innocence was taken as soon as their ordinary everyday life was imposed upon by the Nazis. In Elie Wiesel’s book Night, he describes himself as an innocent teenager, a child whose innocence was taken from him as the result of the nefariousness performed by the Nazis in World War Two. Elie and his family were transported to Birkenau where his family was torn apart, leaving him with his father, his sisters and his mother. Once they were separated, he began to slowly lose his innocence. Towards the end of 1941, in the small village of Sighet, Hungary, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spent most of his time studying the Talmud. Elie was one of four children born to his mother and father. Hilda was the eldest, then Bea, he was the third, and Tzipora was the youngest. The two eldest sisters helped the parents run the family store while Elie stayed home to study. Elie was very passionate about the theology of his religion, Judaism. He studied Talmud by day and by night he would go to the synagogue to pray. One of his main interests was Kabbalah which is an aspect of Jewish mysticism. Elie asked his father to find him a master to guide him in his...
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...adapted to their environment with the extinction of others (Wikipedia: Survival of the Fittest). In Night by Elie Wiesel, in face of extermination the Jews of Sighet commit uncharacteristic ‘sins’. Fear had forced silence, fear had forced evil deeds and fear had turned the Jews against one another. The cruelties of natural selection is described in Night by Elie Wiesel, portraying the breaking of the human spirit, damaging faith in humanity, family, and God. Humanity, an important theme in Elie Wiesel’s memoire is portrayed as an ever changing proposition. The Jews of Sighet, and most importantly Elie, is seen struggling with his conscious based on the inhumane acts of oppression he has witnessed. In the beginning his faith is abundant and is evident through his trust in the German’s and disbelief in Moshie the Beadle (his mentor). “He told me what had happened to him and his companions. …The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed toward a forest. ...Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” (Wiesel 6). Although, Elie did not believe Moshie at first the nightmares described by his mentor became a reality when he had first entered the concentration camps. The traumatizing events witnessed by Elie had caused him to question his faith in the human race while stripping him of reason to live. It was hard for him (Elie) to comprehend that the world would allow the systematic extermination of one race; his conversations...
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...Billy Lynch Ms. Pound English II PreAP/Block 7 14 May 2018 Rhetorical Analysis;“Elie Wiesel’s Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Peace Prize” Author and human rights activist Elie Wiesel, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, discusses the nature of human injustice and its impact on his life and humanity as a whole. He adopts a forthright and heartfelt tone throughout his speech in order to gain support from his audience. Wiesel's purpose is to convince the audience to unite against injustice and human rights violations. In the beginning of the speech, Wiesel’s intention is to remind the audience of the scale and inhumanity of the Jewish genocide and to establish his own personal experiences with it. When presented with the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel asks a hypophora “do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not”. He includes this in order to establish a sense of humility with his audience so the case he presents is much more convincing to them. This...
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