Elie Wiesel's Night and the Holocaust
Elie Wiesel's Night provides a very chilling account of the author's experiences in the death camps of the Nazis during World War II, related through the eyes of a young boy who witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps and the aftermath of the Nazi's attempts to eradicate Jews from the face of the earth. For the casual reader with no knowledge of the Holocaust, Night illuminates exactly what occurred in the concentration camps, events that have been denied even in today's enlightened world. What Wiesel wishes the reader to take away from his book is quite clear-he wants the reader to understand what he went through as a Jew in the concentration camps and wants to make it as obvious as possible that such a thing as the attempted extermination of a race of human beings never happens again. Through his eyewitness accounts as found in Night, the reader comes to see that what the Nazis perpetrated during World War II was akin to mass murder, based on their depraved and twisted desire to eliminate the Jews from Europe, a desire that at first succeeded on a massive scale with the deaths of over six million Jews, but when the camps were liberated b
In Chapter Three of Night, Wiesel reflects on his first night at Buna: "Never shall I forget that night. . . which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. . . " 1 Obviously, the experiences of Buna convinced young Elie that the Holocaust was worse than death itself and forced all Jews to live in one long and terrifying night of hopelessness and desperation. In his eyes, God was dead, too, for he states that "I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted His absolute justice," 2 meaning that even if God did exist, He was not in control of what was happening in Buna nor in Europe. After a long stay in Buna, Elie and his father were sent to Buchenwald, where he watches his father slowly die from malnutrition and disease. The death of his father affected young Elie very greatly, for he states that "after my father's death, nothing could touch me any more," 3 an indication that whatever the Nazis did to him after the death of his
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Approximate Word count = 778
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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