In the book, Elie mentions a boy who is caught trying to steal bread. The Nazi’s feel they must make an example of him, because that kind of behavior could not be tolerated. So they made a spectacle of him, and called the entire camp out to watch him be hung. The boy struggled for thirty minutes as the jews had to watch, helplessly. That was the last straw for Elie.
“Night,” by Elie Wiesel, is a novel of young Wiesel’s survival in the concentration camps during WWII .The overall theme of Night is faith. In 1941, a 12 year old boy named Eliezer Wiesel. He lives in Sighet Transylvania, and he belonged to an Orthodox Jewish family. His dad is a shopkeeper, and his family is highly respected within Sighet's Jewish community. Against his father’s will, Eliezer is into learning religious mysticism such as the Kabbalah.
For example in the novel he blames everything on God but in the article Elie realized everything was man’s fault. As the novel Night goes on, Eliezer is more angered and disappointed by what he sees every day in the concentration camps. “For God’s sake, where is God” (Night 65). When the pipel, a young child, is hung in front of the whole camp, Elie feels that it is his God who is hanging on the gallows, which symbolizes that is God who put them in this. Later on in the article Elie realizes that God did not do anything wrong.
But then Victor has what could be considered a nervous breakdown and is sick for months. This is partly due to his malnourishment and exhaustion but mainly because he is distraught from what he has leashed onto the world. Victor did not have the strength or the courage to go after the creature and was plagued with worries that it was going to show up at any
Once at Auschwitz-Birkenau, after being forced to get a haircut and redressing in prison garb, Wiesel states, “In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (37). Wiesel goes into explicit detail regarding the beatings he and his father received, and that eventually he became desensitized to the pain; thus, the SS dehumanized them by taking away their physical strength and ability to feel. Throughout his book, Wiesel states that they sometimes Breeden 2 received little to no food and he goes onto to describe how the starvation led men to kill each other over scraps of food, and to get themselves killed all for trying to get a bowl of soup. One of the most important ways Wiesel describes that the SS dehumanized them was forcing them to have tattoos, a number. Wiesel
Night by Elie Wiesel is a story based on his personal experiences during the holocaust controlled by the Nazi army in the concentration camps. Towards the end of 1941 all the Jewish people were taken away from their homes by the Nazi army. When they arrived in Auschwitz they Nazi army separated families by their strength, weakness, and gender. All the men and the women were separated. Then the weak and old ones were separated from the young and strong.
At this point this becomes crucial, because the Nazi oppression in the concentration camps makes it harder for any relationship. It is shocking to Elie on many occasions, the cruelty sons show their fathers in many of the barracks. He says of this particular boy, “I saw one of thirteen beating his father because the latter had not made his bed properly. The old man was crying softly while the boy shouted, “If you don’t stop crying I shan’t bring you any more bread. Do you understand?” This event serves a warning to Elie not to lose his sense of compassion towards his father so that they can remain close and continue supporting each other because without each other neither of them will survive.
Elie lost faith in God since he got in the concentration camp and he saw a lot of horrible things, he suffered a lot, but what it hurt him the most is the loss of his family and his dad. When he first got to the concentration camp he felt like he couldn’t do anything against the Nazis. He couldn’t understand why people were like that to his people, the Jews. When he heard the SS officers say “Men to the left, Women to the right” he didn’t know that was the last time he was going to see his mom and little sister and he couldn’t even say good-bye. When he got close to the crematorium he saw babies thrown to the flames, he asked himself “Was I still alive?
Newly arrived prisoners were thrown into the cruel, hard, unfair, horrific world of camp life. The story of a dentist, Benjamin Jacobs, working at Auschwitz tells the horror of his daily life. (www.nizkor.org/features/dentist/chapter12.html) The excerpt from his story tells the dehumanizing he himself experienced: Traumatized, starved, and soaked with human waste, we looked to be the inhuman, useless creatures the Nazis had characterized us as being………….. One day the Kapo kept us outside in the cold rain for more than an hour. When we finally got back into the block, we were dripping wet. We hung our clothes around the room to dry.
While Wiesel is in the concentration camps, he is usually forced to wait hours by the Gestapo. In the situation he waits for his father to hear his fate, but in the concentration camps he waits for the SS officers. Out of all the horrifying and disgusting things in this book, this probably was on the list of things that bothered me the most. The Germans were burning babies and children. I do not see how any human being could do this.