A common theme in Elie Wiesel’s Night is loss of faith. Many times while Elie is in the concentration camp, he finds himself and other Jews losing faith: “Where is merciful God, where is He?” (64) Some Jews were torn between believing that God would help and not. In some parts of the book Elie was saying the Jewish prayer, Kaddish, which is a prayer for mourning and thanking God, and in other parts, he is being stripped of his faith.
In another part in the book, when Elie recites his subparagraph that begins with, “Never shall I forget…” Elie says that he will never forget, “the moments that murdered my god and my soul, and turned my dreams to ashes.” (34) Auschwitz and the other camps have done so much torture to Wiesel, that he doesn’t believe God can help him any more. Without faith, the only thing that keeps him in line is his father.
This experience of the Holocaust affect me on an emotional level. Before this experience I did not know much about the Holocaust I just had heard of horrible man named Adolf Hitler and the genocide he had created. After reading the book Night and after the documentaries and films that we watched I've been slapped by reality. I've been dwelling a lot on my own as well, about how people could have so much hatred on the people who are their neighbors. Just ordinary people that have so much hatred. I'm just so confused how people could just back stab their neighbors as soon as a new political party rose. Ordinary people turning into monsters you don't see that everyday. I've taken away so many things from this unit. I think the thing that just draws me the most from in this unit is to never forget. So many innocent people died just because of what they practiced and what they look like. So the least I can do is memorialize them by never forgetting what happened to them....
Jack,
ReplyDeleteThis theme of loss and gain of faith is one that I found very common in the novel as well. I hadn't even noticed these examples until reading your blog post, and they were very interesting examples.
Jack,
ReplyDeleteThe loss of faith is very prominent throughout the memoir (I wrote about it myself in my blog post), but I felt as though I was experiencing the whole concept for the first time in your example of the "Never shall I forget..." poem. I didn't even notice the part when Elie speaks of the moments that took away his faith when I first read it. It is very compelling and powerful.