Night Essay Night by Elie Wiesel, is a book written to tell the horror and evil that the Holocaust was, so that the future will be able to know about the lives of Jews that were apart of the Holocaust, from a first person perspective. With the belief that it was also away to avoid it ever happening again. The book is narrated by a twelve year old boy in 1941, who lived in Sighet, Hungary with his parents and two sisters. The boy is very religious and has a strong belief in God, he spends much of his time studying the laws of the torah and practicing Jewish traditions. Over a course of changes by 1944, increased harsh measures are increased on the Jews.The Nazi’s went through many steps to dehumanize the Jewish people, with yellow stars and making them live in the ghetto. And then once moved into the concentration camp, the Jews were put through selection, which divides them between who is weak an useless and the strong. If you appeared to be useless by the doctor, then your death would be a lot sooner.
Eliezer and his father are told to lie about their age, in which they do in order to hopefully make it through. Next, they are stripped of their clothes and shaved, disinfected with gasoline, and showered. Jew’s get their names replaced with tattooed numbers as their new identity. The Nazi’s pubically beat and hung the Jewish people, for the others around to see and know that it can happen to them too. He says in the book,”…small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes. . . children thrown into the flames”(32). Leading to his first questioning of his faith. Believing that their can not be a God.After facing such harsh conditions some people did change due to their new life. The brutality did produce a change upon some of the Jews. Regardless of all the brutal attempts by the Nazis to strip the identity of the Jews, many of their spirits remained through the hard times. The sharing of memories or reciting their faith, was a way for many of them to not lose their hope of making it out alive. There were still some that were not able to see past the horrible surrounds and caved. Eliezer’s biggest change throughout the book is his struggle to maintain faith in his religion. He starts to believe that God does not care for him. Many times he questions why God would let such cruel things happen to humans.
From the loss of his family the life he onced lived, to being in a place he imagine hell resembled. He was having more trouble keeping his faith than the others that surrounded him. Many times he mentions that the concentration camp is like hell. But by the end of the book Eliezer ends on “My anger rises up within faith and not outside it.” He is not the caring little boy he once was, he becomes harsh and more into the fact that he just has to survive. The title Night is a significant time for him throughout the book. Starting out he believes that night is when he is the safest. But also at night that is when most of the Jews were losing faith of staying alive and making it out. Also, for himself the night was thinking about everything that was going on around him. At times at night he was forced to stay awake in order to avoid death due to the harsh weather they were in.
