Elie Wiesels Night :: Elie Wiesel Night Essays

Elie Wiesel's Night      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   "For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes.   And we had to look him full in the face.   He was still alive when I passed in front of him.   His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.   Behind me I heard [a] man asking:   Where is God now?"      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   The suffering of this child being hanged is comparable to the suffering endured by many Jews during the holocaust.   This quotation is found in just one of many heart wrenching scenes found in Night, a biography of the holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel.   Wiesel stayed quiet about the holocaust for ten years and his reasoning for this was, "I didn't want to use the wrong words.   I was afraid the words might betray it."   This also may account for the fact that some of the sentences found in Night are very wordy and often are overwhelming to the reader because of the amount of significance found in each.   This flaw, though, is very forgivable under the circumstances.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Besides for the brilliant descriptions found in Night and the feeling that you were walking in Elie's shoes, if he literally had any, Night opens the readers mind to the atrocities of the holocaust and concentration camps.   We take for granted, today, our knowledge of knowing how many Jews were killed by the Nazi's and having a general idea of the kind of life people led in the concentration camps.   People never really stop to think about what it must have felt like not knowing what was going on or what was going to happen next.   Wiesel illustrates this very clearly at the beginning of his autobiography.   He shows the reaction of the townspeople when they first heard of Hitler and German troops and the optimistic approach they ecided to take on life.   This technique of taking the reader to life before the ghettos and the concentration camps is very interesting and unique.   Before reaching about the middle of the novel, the beginning may not really be appreciated.   The reader probably will not realize how much greater the effect is on him/her until he/she notices how much life has changed for