Blog Post #1 - Malaysia

The way Elie Wiesel chose to write his autobiography really stood out to me for many reasons. Elie used very powerful and descriptive language that really makes you feel like you are there with him in the book. Also, the speed at which everything escalates is different than what I expected. Before starting this book all I knew about it was that it was an autobiography by Elie Wiesel about his experience with the Holocaust, I had expected that things would slowly escalate, with one thing adding to another for a chapter or two, but in the first 6 pages of Night, we are informed of the terrible things the Jews were put through. When we first meet Moshe, he is described as very religious. Elie and Moshe get to know each other through their faith in God and their desire to learn more about Him. Shortly after meeting him, Moshe gets sent to the Galician forest, with tons of other jews to be killed. He has an injury in his leg, yet he still manages to escape and gets back home. Moshe thinks it was a miracle from God that he was able to escape, and says that there is a reason God let him live, and get home. Elie and Moshe meet again at the synagogue, where he tells Ellie about what he saw, “The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. the trucks headed toward a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. ... Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place near the Galician Forest, near Kolomay.” (Wiesel 6). Moshe was not passing on information that he had heard from someone else, he was passing on information about what he had seen first hand. I think the reason people did not believe him, was because they did not want to believe that the people who seemed to be treating them so well and being so kind to them could and/ or would do such a thing to them. By reading this and having seen the film about The Nazi Path to Genocide I have a much better understanding of what went on, and what kind of things the Jews saw and went through on pretty much a daily basis in the Concentration Camps. Being in the concentration camps really changed Elie's perception of God and life; "Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never. (Wiesel 34)" The fact that after being in the concentration for maybe one week, and he already has lost faith in God and has already lost his will to live, says a lot about what they went through. Before going to the concentration camps, when he first met Moshe he seemed very happy and determined to accomplish his goals, and his faith in God was very obvious, but then after just a week in a concentration camp, all traces of his old self, are gone. He has become depressed. As Elie and his father are walking to the barracks his father says, "The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria..." in response, Elie says, "Father, if that is true then I don't want to wait. I'll run into the barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames." Elie openly admits that he has lost his will to live and that he would rather commit suicide than to let himself die in the hands of the Germans. The fact that Elie wanted to run into the barbed wire because it would be a better death than the burning alive, stood out to me, because if he didn't want the Germans to have the pride of knowing they killed him in the fire, then wouldn't the Germans still get pride out of the fact that the kid killed himself to avoid the flames? And if he just didn't want to suffer through that, what kept him from running into the barbed wire? After a couple of steps they are directed left, to go to the barracks, but when Elie first had the thought of running into the fence, he had no idea that they were going to live, so what could've kept him from doing it? I think that maybe he wasn't ready to leave his father, and maybe without even realizing it, he would rather die with his father than alone.