Main Themes of the Book 'Night' by Elie Wiesel

Have you ever experienced an event so tragic that it led you to lose your faith in God? Or your childhood and innocence? In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the narrator Eliezer loses his faith and his innocence after his traumatic experiences at the numerous camps during the Holocaust. The review of Night by Elie Wiesel shows the main topics of the story.

His bias is that the world and its people should not be indifferent to the suffering of the world, but should be stopping the injustices perpetrated on the poor. Just as during the Holocaust, indifference allowed the Nazis to gather such control and cause the death of so many people, it was those who were not indifferent who saved those in peril, one of whom was Elie himself. Whether his bias is considered good or bad, it is still a bias.

Summary of Night

Night begins in Elie’s hometown of Sighet, where he lives in a vibrant Jewish community. Wiesel is a very religious teenager, interested in studying the Kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism. The war is going on around them, but the villagers do not believe it will actually come to their doorsteps. However, it does, and Elie and his family and neighbors are taken to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. His mother and youngest sister are gassed, and the rest of the book is about Elie and his father trying to survive the concentration camps. They are sent to Buna and put to work in a factory. They are beaten, starved and treated worse than vermin, but they manage to keep going. By the time they are liberated, Elie's father has died from dysentery, and Elie is skin and bones.

Theme 1: Loss of Faith

“‘Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked. For more than half an hour [the child in the noose] 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 the same man asking: ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows’. This passage occurs as Eliezer witnessed the slow death of the Dutch Oberkapo’s pipel, a young boy hanged for collaborating against the Nazis. This horrible moment signifies the lowest point of Eliezer’s faith in God. The suffering Eliezer sees and experiences during the Holocaust changes his entire view of the world. Before the war, he would have never imagined questioning his God. When Moishe the Beadle asked him why he prays, Eliezer replies, “Why did I pray? What a strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?”. Observance and belief were unquestioned parts of his core sense of identity, so once his faith is irreparably shaken, he becomes a completely different person. Among other things, Night is a perverse coming-of-age story, in which Eliezer’s innocence is cruelly taken from him. The death of the child also symbolizes the death of Eliezer’s own childhood and innocence.

Theme 2: Loss of Innocence 

The first insensible cruelty Eliezer experiences is that of the Nazis. Yet, when the Nazis first appear, they do not seem monstrous in any way. Eliezer recounts, “Our first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring. . . . Their attitude toward their hosts was distant but polite.” So many aspects of the Holocaust are incomprehensible, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is how human beings could so callously slaughter millions of innocent victims. Wiesel highlights this incomprehensible tragedy by pulling the Nazis into focus first as human beings, and then, as the memoir shifts to the concentration camps, showing the brutal atrocities that they committed.

“I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! …”.  

Conclusion

Wiesel writes Night to make sure that nobody will ever forget the events of the Holocaust. Also, to show everybody his experiences specifically as a Jew during the Holocaust and how it affected his faith.