Elie's Night

Elie Wiesel's Night

"For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and

death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the

face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still

red, his eyes were not yet glazed. Behind me I heard [a] man asking: Where

is God now?"

The suffering of this child being hanged is comparable to the suffering

endured by many Jews during the holocaust. This quotation is found in just

one of many heart wrenching scenes found in Night, a biography of the

holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. Wiesel stayed quiet about the holocaust for

ten years and his reasoning for this was, "I didn't want to use the wrong

words. I was afraid the words might betray it." This also may account for

the fact that some of the sentences found in Night are very wordy and often

are overwhelming to the reader because of the amount of significance found in

each. This flaw, though, is very forgivable under the circumstances.

Besides for the brilliant descriptions found in Night and the feeling that

you were walking in Elie's shoes, if he literally had any, Night opens the

readers mind to the

atrocities of the holocaust and concentration camps. We take for granted,

today, our knowledge of knowing how many Jews were killed by the Nazi's and

having a general idea of the kind of life people led in the concentration

camps. People never really stop to think about what it must have felt like

not knowing what was going on or what was going to happen next. Wiesel

illustrates this very clearly at the beginning of his autobiography. He shows

the reaction of the townspeople when they first heard

of Hitler and German troops and the optimistic approach they ecided to take on

life. This technique of taking the reader to

life before the ghettos and the concentration camps is very

interesting and unique. Before reaching about the middle of the

novel, the beginning may not really be appreciated. The reader

probably will not realize how much greater the effect is on

him/her until he/she notices how much life has changed for

Wiesel and the rest of the Jews and how unexpected this change

was. Night shows the progression of an innocent twelve year old

boy who's days were composed of studying the Talmud turn into a

"corpse." The German forces are so adept at breaking the

spirits of the Jews that we can see the effects throughout the

novel.

Elie's faith in God, above all other things, is strong at

the onset of the novel, but grows weaker as time goes on. On

the day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, thousands of men

came to attend services. Thousands of voices repeated, "Blessed

be the Name of the Eternal!" Eliezer thought, "Why, but why

should I bless Him? Because he had thousands of children burned

in his pits?... How could I say to Him: "Blessed art thou,

Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the

races to be tortured day and night? Praised be Thy Holy Name,