8A Night Blog 2018

While studying the Holocaust, I learned so much. Before this unit, I only knew the basics. I knew about Hitler and the camps, but that was pretty much it. After learning so much, my thoughts on humanity has completely changed. It’s so hard to think about the fact that this kind of stuff is happening right now. During Elie Weisel’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, one of the things he was focusing on was “never again”. That is what I was thinking too. No one should ever have to go through any of that. The one thing I could take from this unit is that you should never give up for the world. In the memoir Night by Elie Weisel, Elie was starting to give up on living while staying in the concentration camps. The only person who ‘kept him alive’ was his dad. Elie actually told himself that if his dad died when he died too. The way we can bear witness to all of this is to make sure as many people can hear these stories as possible. Whether it is from a survivor themselves or a story passed dow...

Hell Does Not Last Forever My soul had been invaded and devoured by a black flame. Why did I pray? Why did I live? Why did I breathe? Blessed be God’s name But why would I bless Him? God is testing us, I no longer accepted God’s silence. The silence became more oppressive. I no longer pleaded for anything, How can I believe? Where is merciful God? How can anyone believe in this God of Mercy? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe Who chose us among all the nations To be tortured day and night. To watch our fathers, our mothers, our brothers End up in flames? Why would You go on troubling these poor people’s wounded minds? You have betrayed, Allowed them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned. What do they do? They pray before you! It’s over. God is no longer with us. Don’t cry. Keep your anger, your hate. For Hell does not last forever.

In the book Night by Elie Weisel, Elie has an immense loss of hope in God. At the beginning of the book, Elie spent almost every day studying the Bible, wanting to know more. Later in the memoir, he loses more and more faith in God by the day: “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves?” (67). Elie is starting to doubt the people who still have some hope in God. He believed that if God really cared, he would have helped the Jews already. He assumed that God no longer has any interest in the people in concentration camps and went on to deal with someone or something else. The only person that Elie really had hope it was his own father: “I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him” (69). In this quote, Elie is becoming angry with God. He feels His silence is unacceptable at a time like th...

Jews in concentration camps forced to bury other victims. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1178940

Elie Wiesel’s writing style in Night is fairly quick and captivating. He has a way of narrating his story in a swift manner while also making the story understandable as well. I was able to read the book with almost complete understanding. For me, it has been incredibly difficult for me to read this book. It had gotten to a point that I could not bring myself to read any longer. Sometimes I had to walk away and do something else. Just imagining what these people have gone through, all the misery and torture, it is just so hard for me too wrap my head around: “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes I did see this, with my own eyes… children thrown into the flames.”(32). When I read that part of the book, I was speechless. I felt the anger and sadness boiling up inside me. For a long time, the only thing I could think about was that quote. I could just picture ...