I believe the overarching theme of Elie Wiesel’s novel Night was luck and the lack of luck. Wiesel’s father had gotten word that the Nazis were going to evacuate the ghettos that they were forced to move to. He went around to alert the neighbors of the sudden yet expected change. “My father was running right and left, exhausted, consoling friends, checking with the Jewish Council just in case the order had been rescinded. To the last moment, people clung to hope” (15). Wiesel’s father had gotten word that in the morning the ghettos would be evacuated and everyone would be sent to camps. He went around spreading the news to prepare people. If he hadn’t have heard this news, no one would have been prepared and the morning of evacuation would be even more awful: “‘Someone is knocking at the sealed window, the one that faces outside!’... But by the time we succeeded in opening the sealed window, it was too late. There was nobody outside.” (14) Wiesel explains that after the war, he found out that the person knocking was his father’s friend who was a Hungarian policeman. He was coming to warn them that there was danger. If the Wiesels had been able to open the window in time, they may have been able to escape. Wiesel and his father get moved to a different camp and request to be able to work next to each other. They are “lucky” enough to be able to work next to each other.“‘Please sir… I’d like to be near my father,’ ‘All right. Your father will work here, next to you.’ We were lucky.” (50) In many situations, families were separated, broken, or even forced to harm or kill each other. Wiesel and his father were “lucky” because the concentration camp they had been placed in was less harsh than some of the others. Wiesel’s “luck” provided him with a sense of hope throughout his experience in the Holocaust. This may have and is most likely one of the main reasons he remained hopeful and survived the Holocaust. Luck was a significant factor in Elie Wiesel’s survival of the Holocaust.
The way Wiesel writes his memoir is almost like it’s written in prose, he is extremely descriptive with his writing, and his sentences flow, but he keeps the plot fast-paced and moving like the greatest poems are. There was one part I read that almost brought me to tears: the uncertainty of it, the questions it left, and the horrifying thought that it was pure hope that was keeping these people alive when there truly was nothing to hope for. “Take care of your son. He is very weak, very dehydrated. Take care of yourselves, you must avoid selections. Eat! Anything. Anytime. Eat all you can. The weak don’t last very long around here”… And he himself was so thin, so withered, so weak… “The only thing that keeps me alive,” he kept saying, “is to know that Reizel and the little ones are still alive. Were it not for them, I would give up.” One evening, he came to see us, his face radiant. “A transport just arrived from Antwerp. I shall go to see them tomorrow. Surely they will hav...
Luck was totally an overarching theme in "Night." There are so many ways that things could've ended up bad for Elie in his dad and yet they prevailed throughout most of the story. I think you did a really good job on this.
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