Jeffery Dou

Mrs. Reeves

Honors English I G7

9 November 2021

Night: Faith’s Destruction in the Holocaust

Elie Wiesel’s Night is a memoir of Wiesel’s personal experience of the Holocaust. As a teenager, Wiesel was deported from his home in Sighet, and forcibly transported to a concentration camp with his family. There, he would see the true horrors of the Holocaust. He would lay witness to the burning flesh of the crematoria, the pains of hunger, the exhaustion of hard labor. Through these tragedies, Wiesel’s once strong faith in his God and religion was slowly broken down. From his story, Wiesel tells the reader a universal message. Through his usage of metaphors, syntax, and dialogue, Wiesel reveals to the reader that destruction and suffering can break down and destroy any person’s faith.

Wiesel’s usage of metaphor can show the reader how his faith was damaged upon laying eyes on the nightmarish scenes of the concentration camps. When Elie awakes on his first night in Auschwitz, he has changed on both a physical and mental level. After parting ways with his mother and little sister for the last time, Elie first sees the crematoria. Men, women, children, even babies thrown like trash into hellish burning pits. Potential friends, colleagues, even relatives turn to nothing but bones and ash. From this experience, Wiesel writes; “The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames.” (Wiesel 37) The metaphor seeks to compare the death of Elie’s innocence in faith to the lives set alight in the crematorium. The “student of Talmud” (Wiesel 37) refers to Elie himself, one of the past, who devoted his heart and life to his faith in God, studying the religious text of the Talmud fervently. But now, after what he has seen, his past devout self, and his faith as a whole begin to crack. Elie never died in the crematoria of Birkenau, but his faith and devotion’s death began there. These cracks slowly grew as he lived from camp to camp, from meal to meal, from work to work. Soon, Elie no longer cares for his faith or his studies. He only cares for another day of survival. “I was nothing but a body.” (Wiesel 52) The word “body”often connotes a sense of lifelessness, almost corpse-like in nature. Wiesel uses this metaphor to emphasize what only mattered to him at this point was basic survival, the mere act of existing. He cared little for his God, with only his watery soup and stale bread to believe in. The “student of Talmud” (Wiesel 37) is dead, consumed by the fires of Birkenau and only a soulless, hungering corpse remains.

Elie Wiesel uses syntax via the rhetorical question in order to insinuate and amplify his doubts and anger towards his God. Elie’s seeds of doubts first form when Elie first witnesses the crematoria of Birkenau. During this scene, Elie is told that he and his father will join the crematoria and die in the flames. Many beside Elie, even his father, begin to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Elie turns against the crowd, asking; “What was there to thank Him [God] for?” (Wiesel 33) This question helps establish the doubts surrounding Elie’s faith, as he begins to wonder why his God stood silent as his people died below him. Why should Elie thank and honor God for doing nothing during the mass killing of innocent lives? These seeds of doubt grow into towering trees of anger against God as Night progresses. Elie’s anger can be seen during the mass Rosh Hashanah prayer in the Buna camp. When the rest of his camp are deep in prayer, Elie confronts his God, asking “What are You, my God!” This rhetorical question is accusatory, emphasizing Elie’s frustration and anger towards his God. Why would a kind, gentle and loving God force his men to endure so much pain and suffering? Both of these questions convey that Elie is doubtful and angry towards his God. His destroyed faith is not one of God’s existence, but of his mercy and kindness.

Elie was far from the only one to abandon the idea of a kind and loving God, as shown in the usage of dialogue within Night. Wiesel writes about an old Polish rabbi he met during his time in Buna. The rabbi was often prone to prayer, whether that be in the block or at work. He, being a rabbi, was also well read in the Talmud, often reciting entire pages of it. However, this devotion would not last. The rabbi would eventually tell Elie “It’s over. God is no longer with us.” (Wiesel 76) Wiesel inserted this piece of dialogue into Night in order to demonstrate how even the most devout of people like the rabbi, could lose their faith in the camps. The rabbi must’ve seen similar things and events like Elie, and thus asks similar questions. “Where is God’s mercy?” (Wiesel 77) the rabbi asks. The dialogue shows the reader how the camps could easily destroy anyone’s faith in a kind and loving God. Another example is Meir Katz, in the train headed to Buchenwald. Meir Katz physically was one of the strongest men in the train, as he was not as malnourished as many of the other prisoners. He even saved Elie from near death when he unhands someone trying to strangle him. But his faith was not as strong. Katz tells Elie’s father, “I can’t go on…” (Wiesel 102) This dialogue shows that Katz’s faith in surviving the Holocaust has been lost. During the Holocaust, Katz witnessed the taking of his son in the selection, and many of the same tragedies seen by Elie. After seeing these horrors, Meir Katz was no longer strong enough to survive the journey, dying before the train arrived in Buchenwald. Both of these quotes show that Elie was not the only one to lose his faith, showing that any person could as well.

Elie Wiesel’s usage of metaphors, syntax, and dialogue help show how something as strong as the emotional force of faith in something, whether that be a God or survival, can easily be broken when witnessing suffering and destruction. Elie’s faith in a merciful God is originally quite strong, but as he watches the Holocaust unfold before his eyes, his faith slowly decays and dies out. From Elie, and from the book as a whole, we can identify how many of us have faith in something, and what life would be like without it. Faith is a very powerful thing, and we should not let it be destroyed.