Trapped Choices They were given so many choices, only to be led down a path that conjoined at the end regardless of how long it took or how they got there, and one of the millions who walked that path was Elie Wiesel. The path was an intricate structure, perfected by the Nazi party during the period of WWII from 1933 to 1945. It was used as a way of mental, physical, psychological, and even generational torture as the lasting effects of it have lived through the families of those who walked this path. After the manipulation of not only the German population but the Jewish as well, the Nazi party, with the Axis Powers, moved Jewish, Polish, gypsy, and other groups through the process of the Holocaust, using it as a systematic way for mass execution …show more content…
The Nazi party confined and separated Jews from society, only providing the necessary rations. The Jewish were eventually forced to adapt to this new lifestyle and appoint their own small society within their community, electing small leaders and even law enforcement. “. We even thought ourselves rather well of; we were entirely self-contained. A little Jewish republic.... We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department --a whole government machinery. “(pg 16). However, just when the Jewish Ghetto seemed to be almost normal in the memoir Night Elie then describes how the Jewish leaders are told they must choose the next list of victims for whatever the Nazi party had in store for them or else they would choose randomly. The Leader of the Ghetto made the painful decision to write down the names of the sick, the elderly, and those who couldn’t work including younger ages of children.”’I have terrible news,’ he said at last. ‘Deportation.’ The ghetto was to be completely wiped out. We were to leave street by street, starting the following day.”(pg 18). This growing pressure resumed from the Nazi enforcement until they eventually moved everyone to a new location group by group, Elie’s group being the last chosen. This string of events shows that even though the Jewish community was able to settle a new way of …show more content…
The memoir Night explains how Elie and his family are originally separated and sorted by sex, age, profession, and physical capability. After being separated from his sister and mother, with only his father by his side, he is forced to go through the grueling process of camp admission, even after learning the horrific fates suffered by his sister and mother.”Who knows what may have become of them - but we had little concern for their fate. We were incapable of thinking of anything at all...A barrel of petrol at the entrance.. Disinfection. Everyone was soaked in it, Then a hot shower. At high speed. As we came out from the water, we were driven outside. More running. Another barrack, the store. Very long tables. Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran.”(pg 45). Later on in the process, he is admitted to the camp Buna and almost immediately warned by other prisoners to stay in the camp since it was one of the better ones and stay away from the building force. Elie’s thoughts of how he sees this as a forced choice are also mentioned in this scene of the memoir Night.”We began to look for familiar faces, to seek information, to question the veteran prisoners about which labor unit was the best, which block one should try to get into. The
Each time Elie was making a decisions insignificant or not it change the course of his future. For this exact reason people tell you to think first before you act or else there will be consequences big or small. Night,a memoir written
In the novel Night, Elie undergoes changes within himself, and his thoughts, as his father finally succumbs to the maltreatment of the Nazis. During the later days of their interment, Elie assumes the role as caretaker for his father, as he suggests that “[he] was his [father’s] sole support” (87). Elie transforms from an innocent child in need of care to the care taker. Without Elie, his father would surely die, thus Elie chooses to continue his agonizing life. Elie and his father were kept alive by hope, hope that one day, one of them would be able to survive these horrid times.
Ava G. Mendez Mr. Strack English 9 February 5th, 2023 In the book, “Night” Jewish people in concentration camps were treated with unfathomable cruelty. It shows the true story and sad reality of young Elie and his struggles in the concentration camps. Prisoners were often beaten for no reason, deprived of food, and treated in the most inhumane ways possible.
Eventually the German army were in their streets but no one did anything because the soldiers were not causing any problems. Elie writes about how even some of the jews housed the soldiers and during that time the soldiers were very respectful, but one day the German soldiers received orders to move all the Jews into two ghettos that were just built in the city (Wiesel7). The Jews try to be optimistic though and see it as an opportunity to build a closer community because now they get their own spot of the city for themselves, they even set up a council and police force. Elie writes that the adults are trying to paint it as a brighter picture ignoring the fact that their outside windows facing the city are closed up and boarded from the outside and they are surrounded by barbed wire (Wiesel 9). Later Elie and his family were deported to
The memoir Night is a text that displays several theme topics with deeply rooted emotional ties. One theme that is expressed and explored in Night is self preservation versus family commitment. An instance nearing the beginning of the story involves the former maid of the Wiesel family offering a safe place at her village so the family would not be taken away to the concentration camps. In response, Elie’s father tells Elie and his two elder sisters, "If you wish, go there. I shall stay here with your mother and the little one…" Elie and his sisters refuse, which demonstrates how they would rather keep their family together than protect themselves.
The decisions you make in your life always come with a good or bad ending. In the novel “night” by elie wiesel, elie has to make life and death decisions. This novel is about how elie made decisions that lead him and his family to a concentration camp and explains the horrible things they have had to experience. In the end elie was the only survivor in his family. The decisions throughout the novel Elie made impacted his life and his innocence.
The book Night by Elie Wiesel teaches many different lessons about the human nature, human condition, and society. Elie is a boy who grew up in Sighet, Transylvania (present day Romania) during the time that the Nazis and Adolf Hitler came to power. After being placed in ghettos, the Jews of Sighet eventually got shipped off to the concentration camps, the first being Auschwitz/Birkenau. When the Jews first arrived at these camps, they made sure to keep their friends and family close, and they looked out for each other. After months passed by, many began to grow weak due to the lack of food and harsh conditions that they faced.
It was a community that were split up; that is how the government called them. Elie and his father was together in the community with their family. Then Elie father went to a meeting. After that meeting people had to pack up since there were going to be somewhere. Many were scared, there were more confused of what is going on.
As Elie and his father made their way through the camp and the process, they discovered the camp’s difficulty. Once they concluded going through the camp process, someone says, ‘... Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium. Work or crematorium-the choice is yours’ (Wiesel 38-39).
Then, the Germans force the Jew to form small ghettos within the town. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz. Upon his arrival in Birkenau, Eliezer and his father are separated from his mother and sisters, whom they never see again. At Birkenau, the Germans perform “selections” to determine who should be killed immediately or put to work.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
In the beginning of Elie’s experience, he gets the choice to abandon the ghetto and go with the family’s former maid to a safe shelter. He chose to stay because Elie would have been separated from his parents and little sister. This choice had a negative impact, but also a positive one. The negative side is that Elie’s family stayed in the ghettos, and then the concentration camps. At the time, no one could believe the rumors about the Nazis.
They desperately searched for a scapegoat to blame for these tragedies. With race theory emerging across the European continent the Jewish people became a meek and lower class “race”. German leaders distributed propaganda advertising the Jews as the causation of the downfall of Germany. Cruel propaganda infecting the minds of the masses led to repercussions of millions forced to live between choiceless choices and life and death. Elie Wiesel was compelled to make choiceless choices throughout the Holocaust, and these choiceless choices were often made to remain alive.
Once liberated from these concentration camps, Elie has done much to make people around the world more aware of the indescribable events that occurred during his time in these camps, and make sure that people will speak out against these events instead of staying silent, so that these events may be prevented in the future. He wrote many pieces and delivered many speeches in attempt to lift the world out of indifference. I believe that Elie’s novel Night communicates his message more effectively than his speech, Perils of Indifference. Not only does it convey his message of that we all must speak out against
Surviving a series of Choiceless Choices The appointment of Adolf Hitler to chancellor sparked one of the darkest times in recent human history. Under his rule, Jews and others not seen as “pure” by the nazi ideology were first crammed into ghettos and months later, forced into concentration camps. In the nonfiction novel titled Night by Elie Wiesel, the narrator, Elie himself, describes the extreme hardships faced by prisoners at these camps.