8A Night Blog 2018

Studying the Holocaust has changed my view on the world forever. Before studying this horrific time in history, I viewed the Holocaust as something that happened long ago, or something that was so inhumane that I almost thought of it as fiction. As Elie Wiesel stated in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, “This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed?” Seeing the horrors in detail at the Holocaust Museum and learning about the Holocaust in class has taught me that we must help others that are in situations similar to the Holocaust, because we cannot let history repeat itself. Before studying this unit, I had no idea that so many people were suffering worldwide and so many genocides have occurred/are occurring even today. What baffles me the most is that we have done nothing to help these people. We have barely even given them a voice to use, let alone attempted to free them from their tormentors. We are the Free Nation, yet we sit...

flames the chimneys of the crematorium stood tall like a withered tree calling my name huge flames rising men women children thrown into the flames bodies transformed into smoke we were all people condemned to the same fate we marched forward very close to us were the pit and its flames we were face to face with the Angel of Death

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running right and left, exhausted, consoling friends, checking with the Jewish Council just in case the order had been rescinded.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 o...

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154760

So far, Elie Wiesel’s Night has provided me with a different perspective of what happened in the Holocaust: “The synagogue resembled a large railroad station: baggage and tears. The altar was shattered, the wall coverings shredded, the walls themselves bare. There were so many of us, we could hardly breathe. The twenty-four hours we spent there were horrendous. The men were downstairs, the women upstairs. It was Saturday--the Sabbath--and it was as though we were there to attend services. Forbidden to go outside, people relieved themselves in a corner.” (22) I knew prior to starting to read Night that the Jews were treated horrifically, but it had a different impact on me when I heard it from a first-person point. Elie Wiesel’s decision to write in first person made his writing that much more powerful. It is almost unfathomable to think that these horrible things happened to people just like us not so long ago. It makes me sad and ashamed to hear the torture people suffered: “They pas...