Attempting to Understand Eliezer Wiesel’s Night :: Eliezer Wiesel Night

Attempting to Understand Eliezer Wiesels NightNight is a story about a young boys life during the Holocaust. He uses a different name in the story, Eliezer. He comes from a highly Orthodox Jewish family, and they observed the Jewish traditions. His father, Shlomo, a shopkeeper, was very involved with the Jewish community, which was confined to the Jewish section of town, c whollyed the shtetl. In 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities of Europe in break of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935-designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice. The Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944. In Wiesels native Sighet, the disaster was even worse of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet shtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Po land. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. Wiesels father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Wiesel himself survived and immigrated to France. His story is a horror story that comes to life when students in high school read this novel. Even though many students have not witnessed or participated in such horror, they relate to the character because Wiesel is their age. They cannot believe someone went through the nightmare he did at their age. This book focuses on many themes conflict, silence, inhumaneness to others, and father/son bonding. We see many, too many, conflicts this young man faces. Eliezer struggles with his faith throughout the story. He believes that God is everywhere, and he cant understand how God could let this happen, peculiarly as Eliezer faces conflict everyday in the concentration camp. He also learns silence means. He says he says it is Gods silence that he doesnt understand. He feels that Gods silence demonstrates the absence seizure of divine compassion. Another silence that drive confuses Eliezer is the silence of the victims. He cannot understand why they dont fight back, especially with the inhumanity that is forced upon them. It is because of this inhumanity that he loses faith, not only in God but also in men. He tells how at the beginning, the Germans were distant but friendly. However, when they reach the camps, the soldiers are transformed from men to monsters.