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Maddie Smith

Mrs. Drummond

English

5 December 2018

Loss

Was Elie and the other Jews able to keep a strong connection to their God after being put

in the concentration camps? Were they strong willed or weak willed in their faith towards their

God? Were the Jews naive or did they know what was going to happen in the future? In Wiesel’s

memoir Night, Wiesel demonstrates to people the horrendous events that occurred in the

concentration camps. Elie was twelve and wanted to have a master guide him in his studies of the

Kabbala, that was around the end of 1941. Later he was taken to the camps with the rest of the

little town he lived in and that’s when everything changed for Wiesel.Wiesel uses his memoir,

Night, to development a variety of themes in order to teach his readers valuable lessons about his

life in concentration camps; the two most important themes of the memoir, however, are the loss

of faith in God, or humanity and the disbelief of Jews at their fate.

In Night, Wiesel uses his experiences at the camps to convey his message that loss of

faith can be devastating. All the people around Elie started to recite the prayer for the dead for

themselves. “Yitgadla veyi kadach shmé rada...May His Name be blessed and magnified….” Elie

thinks to himself, “Why should I bless [his God’s] name? The Eternal…. All-Powerful…. was

silent. What had I to thank Him for?”(Wiesel 42). This is when Wiesel first started to question

his God and that’s where the seed of doubt begin to manifest within. This was a extremely big

significant ordeal in Wiesel’s life because he was a kid who knew only of his religion and had
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never bothered to look at anything else in life. The feelings and rage Wiesel felt the first night of

the camps were overpowering. “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith

forever….Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and [Wiesel’s] soul and

turned my dreams to dust”(Wiesel 43). Elie Wiesel was a very religious kid and that was

immensely important to him because it was all he had know, he grow up with it and to have it so

forcefully and suddenly ripped away is devastating. That night changed his views on everything

he thought he already knew. Wiesel clearly is showing that he believes that religion can not save

people when in need all it can give people is hope but sometimes that hope can be snuffed out

and then it becomes false hope and that worse than having no hope at all.

In Night, Wiesel uses his experiences with his people to convey his message that the

disbelief of Jews at their fate causes people to not trulley see what is going on around them, they

only see what they want to see. When the Germans first came to the town where Wiesel and his

family lived they started to take over all the people that had any power in the town. “The

Germans were already in the town, the Fascists were already in power, the Verdict had already

been pronounced, yet the Jews of sight continued to smile”(Wiesel 19). Even though they have

heard reports and warnings about the Germans, they stayed optimistic and denied that harm will

come. The irony exists in that the readers know that soon they will lose the will to smile. This

disbelief in there fate creates not only frustration in the reader; but also a tragic outcome for the

characters. When the Germans first come to the town they were nice and non-violent, “[The

Germans] attitude toward their hosts was distant, but polite…. They never demanded the

impossible, made no unpleasant comments, and even smiled occasionally at the mistress of the
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house”(Wiesel 19). Though they have heard of what the Germans have done it was hard to

believe when the Germans were being so polite and showed no ill will towards them.

Elie was not as strong willed as he thought and many others lost their faith as well. Elie’s

and many other Jews faith dissipated over the time they were in the camps. The Jews in Elie’s

town knew what was going to happen if the Germans came but they stayed regardless because

they were naive to think that no real harm would come to them and with that they were wrong.

Elie Wiesel uses loss of faith to show his readers that when people lose their faith it is due to a

traumatic experience and can be devastating. Wiesel also uses the disbelief of Jews at their fate

to show that if people always think that nothing can go wrong, when it does they will not be

prepared. These themes are important because it shows the readers that people cannot always be

carefree and that people should not make their belief be everything to them. This is important

because it shows what people can do to other people and how cruel they can be. The Holocaust

was a time where if a person were to be different they would be killed or worse. People can learn

a lot about how people can act just to have more power than another.