Night Essay

Cheyanne Barba

Mrs. Bosch

Honors English 10P

8 January 2008

Hours of Darkness

With the absence of the sun and the introduction of the moon, most creatures take advantage of this time to regain their energy to survive the approaching day. Unfortunately, not everything and everyone is at peace during the night. Many relentless occurrences can also happen, car accidents are frequent and so are deaths. Death happens all of the time, it’s apart of life but innocent death is unforgiving; some of the largest and cruelest vindictive killings are those of the Holocaust during the early nineteen-forties. Not all the suffering was held until nighttime, the Jewish people suffered all of the time but for one man, night seemed to bring on a whole other world which drastically changed his views on life. This survivor of WWII was Elie Wiesel; he was a teenager when he was admitted into Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp. After the war had ended Wiesel wrote a book on his experiences called Night. Wiesel includes his struggles that he has to go through everyday and night to survive the harsh work of the concentration camp that he lived in with his father. The nights that lead up to Wiesel’s confinement and the night’s that he experiences begin to wear on him, eventually night becomes a symbol for God’s absence from Wiesel’s world, his pain and suffering, and the silence of his voice to stand up in what he believes in. During and after the Holocaust Wiesel’s life was altered to the extreme and his life was forever changed by those nights that seemed to trail on for eternity.

In the beginning of the book Wiesel has a very strong faith in God; he practices his religion’s doctrines and prays to God whenever he can. As Wiesel goes through life in the concentration camp his faith slowly decreases with every minor and major event that affects his stay at the concentration camp. His faith is picked apart by the sights of children that have been hung before his eyes, of the burning of bodies’ everyday in the crematory, and of the torture he and his fellow Jews are put through. When Wiesel is supposed to be sleeping he begins to think about God and realizes that he “Never shall…forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself” (32). Wiesel is struggling with his faith in God but still keeps the thought of Him in his mind by comparing himself to God. Wiesel does not believe that if God was real he would let the Jews suffer so much, he does not know what his people had done wrong in order to receive that sort of punishment and his ultimate answer is that they have done nothing, it’s simply the fact that God does not exist. Night emphasizes all of these blasphemous thoughts and feelings because at night suffering is the worst; it’s when Wiesel and his family were first deported, when he first arrived at Birkenau, another concentration camp, and it is also when Wiesel and other men are forced to run forty-two miles non stop in order to not be shot. All of these incidents reflect on Wiesel’s struggling faith in God.

The genocide of the Jewish people during World War II was malicious and unbelievable; it’s quite amazing that there were any survivors. The Jewish people had to suffer everyday for years, going through the pains of losing family members, their lives that would never be the same, and having to never know when they would be given redemption. Wiesel was fortunate to be one of the few Jews to survive the Holocaust, it was not easy and he explains this through his book. Wiesel suffered a great deal during the war, he lost his faith in God which hr do strongly believed in at one point, he had to handle the was first hand when he was only fifteen, and ultimately he lost all of his family except for his father and they stuck together as long as possible through the unyielding war. Although life in a war can change a person and Wiesel thinks to himself, despite his better knowledge that “it’s too late to save your old father…you ought to be having two rations of bread, two rations of soup…only a fraction of a second, but I felt guilty” (105). This pain of knowing that Wiesel has lost everything and now has to lose his father is brought out in night because his father’s sickness began with the captive’s “pitch darkness” (81) from Buna.

The Jewish people were not allowed to be treated like humans and had no voice in anything. Wiesel understood this right away, before he was even entered into a concentration camp, in the ghetto that the Jews were forced to live in before their deportation. Their deportation was of course, not by choice and the friends and family of the Wiesel’s were quite frightened when Wiesel’s father came back to their backyard where everyone was gathered late at night to tell them of the “…terrible news…” (11). the news was that “the ghetto was to be completely wiped out” (11). Soon chaos filled the cool night air and the people of the ghetto began to prepare for their unexpected extensive and tough journey. All throughout Wiesel’s and the other six million Jews who were contained had no stand or opinion on anything, no matter how much they were beaten or saw other wrong doings being imposed. The silence of the night stressed the reality that Wiesel had no right to stand up for what he believed was immoral.

The night brings on a whole different world to many people; some sleep and others have to deal with the pains of living. For Elie Wiesel the night brought on a totally different outlook on life. His first experience with night was when he and the rest of his Jewish community were deported to a concentration camp. On other nights Wiesel struggled with his belief and trust in God and in humanity, both seemed not to care what occurred to the Jews. These nights turned into symbols for Wiesel’s lost faith in God, his pain and suffering throughout the war, and the forced silence of his individuality that was not able to shine through.

Works Cited

Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York:

Bantam Books, 1982.