When going through hard
times, some people reach to God for help, and some don’t. “Night” by Elie
Wiesel is a non-fiction book about his own experiences in the Holocaust. The
book starts in 1941 when Elie is about thirteen years old. He is living in
Sighet, a small town in Transylvania. He is a devout Jew and takes religion very
seriously. World War II is going on but no one thinks the German troops will
ever reach them. But one day, they come. All the Jews in Sighet are forced onto
a train with almost no food or water for several days. They are taken to a
concentration camp where Elie and his father are separated from his mother and
sisters. The reader infers that they are killed. Over the several years that
Elie and father spend in concentration camps, Elie slowly loses his faith in God.
In the beginning of the book, Elie is very interested in
God and studying the Kabbalah. He is studying Judaism with Moishe the Beadle.
Moishe devotes much of his time to his and Elie’s religious studying. One
evening Moishe asks Elie why he prays. Elie is shocked by this question and doesn’t
know how to respond. He thinks to himself “Why did I pray? Strange question.
Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (p. 4). Elie takes comfort in God and
praying. To him, it is natural. He was only 13 years old at the time yet he “…studied
the Talmud [by day] and by night I would run to weep over the destruction of
the temple.” (p. 3). Even at such a young age he was very serious about his
studies and his practice.
When the German troops come and take all the Jews away,
Elie is still practicing Judaism and believes God will save him and his people.
But as Elie spends some time in concentration camps, you see him start to lose
faith. As Elie and his father are entering their first concentration camp, the
weak are being separated and thrown into a fire. As they are waiting to be
looked over, Elie’s father starts to pray, saying, “May His [God’s] name be
celebrated and sanctified…” (p. 33) Elie hears his father praying and says, “For
the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name?
The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be
silent. What was there to thank him for?” (p. 33). This is the first time you
see Elie start to separate from religion, questioning God and his motives. He
no longer knows what to believe, his studying with Moishe or the unattended to
pain and hurt in the eyes of his people.
After spending a year or two in concentration camps, you
see Elie give up on God and his religious beliefs. In the camps, he has been
whipped, starved and treated as an object to be owned, not a person. One day,
the prisoners, including Elie and His father, are called to roll call. They are
forced to watch a young boy be hanged. In front of him, Elie hears someone ask,
“‘For God’s sake, where is God?’” (p. 65). Elie responds to this man saying, “‘Where
He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows…’” (p. 65). This is the point
in the book where you see Elie give up on God. At such a young age, only 15
years old, he has seen so much death and sorrow that he believes God, the
immortal, must be dead, along with the rest of the Jews.
Especially hard or troubling times in people lives can
make them reach to or away from God. In Elie Wiesel’s case, in his non-fiction account
of his own struggles in the Holocaust, it’s away. As Elie deals with being
forced from his home and separation from his mother and sisters, he starts to
lose belief in God and his own religion, one he practiced very strongly before.
He rebels against God, at one point almost yelling at him for all the
destruction he allowed to continue. When he loses religion, he loses an extremely
important part of his life, and once his father dies, he has no one to turn to
for comfort. The last line of the book is “From the depths of the mirror, a
corpse was contemplating me.” (p. 115). With the lack of love or religion in
his life, Elie doesn’t feel like a real person anymore.
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