8A Night Blog 2019

Before I read Night , before I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, before I watched One Survivor Remembers , and before I learned that 6 million Jews died during the Holocaust, I could never have imagined mankind cabable of such a horrendous act. I experienced such a whirlwind of emotions as I read Night ; Wiesel’s book made me feel so much sadness, but I also felt empowered. Reading Night made me question what I would have done if I was living during the time of the Holocaust. Would I have been as brave? Would I have survived. I can not even begin to fathom the tremendous amount of strength it took for the Jews to fight back and keep the will to survive. Knowing that people have gone through such loss and hardship, I feel as if I can do anything. In one of the most powerful statements from Night , Wiesel writes, “Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night on the train, the last night in Buna.” I find this statement to ...

Our studies of the Holocaust this past month have completely changed my perspective on the subject. I did not fully understand the brutality and inhumanity of it all. I only treated it factually, but the memoir Night , the Holocaust Museum and the many other primary sources we have learned from have showed the emotional aspect of the Holocaust that I was lacking. For instance, when writing about his entry into the Auschwitz concentration camp, Elie Wiesel is filled with pain, and emotion, things that help one truly empathize with the victims of the Holocaust. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never” (22). There is such power in his words because of his profound, poetic st...

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night introduced many important themes as it progressed. One of the most important themes of the book was faith which significantly altered Elie’s perception of humanity. Learning about Elie’s relationship with God and a higher power was so powerful that it made me question my own beliefs. Elie’s main question throughout the book was basically that if there is such a God with infinite power, why would he allow something this terrible to occur? Sadly, the question is never answered in the book, (and I’m not sure if anyone can answer this) but the message that I learned from it was that good goes around. Since Elie looked out for his father throughout his whole journey, Elie was blessed enough to survive. This is important because it ties in with the role of luck in the novel. The roles of faith and luck are constantly counteracting each other in the book. Elie discusses multiple incidents where his family could’ve been saved, or Elie himself could’ve died a lot earl...

For the time that I have been studying the Holocaust, it has been a good learning experience. I have learned of the great inhumane actions of the Nazis and the Jews uprising and escaping. In the book Night I learned what it was like in a concentration camp. I learned what the inhumane acts of the Nazis were and what they did towards the Jewish people. The things that the Nazis did are unimaginable. They would burn people alive and kill them in gas chambers. In the book, Elie says that they would burn babies in a pit or use them as target practice. They would also cram 80 to 100 people in a tiny box car without food or water for a long time. Towards the end of the war, Nazi officers forced prisisnoers to run for 3 months in snow, and if they didn't keep the pace they would get shot. This matters because over 6 million Jews died in the holocaust and over 11 million people died in the war. Over half of the jews in all of Europe died. In Elie Wiesel's Nobel acceptance speech, he sa...