Night: An Appreciation

     Night, by Elie Wiesel is a practically biographical account of a young Jewish boy's account of the Holocaust.  In the beginning of the book, Eliezer, the main character is removed from society along the the other Jewish people in his community, and put into an enclosed ghetto.  They live there for a while slowly experiencing more and more restrictions on Jews.  Eventually, they start removing the people from the ghetto, and on trains that will take them to Auschwitz, and Eliezer and his father end up at Buchenwald after that.  Throughout this journey Eliezer completely changes and loses everything, including his family.  

     One aspect of Night that I thought was interesting was how Eliezer loses all faith in his once cherished religion during his time at the concentration camps.  When the book starts, Eliezer is completely interested in learning about and studying his religion.  Every night, he intently reads and dissects the meaning of pages of religious texts for hours sometimes.  When he sees the concentration camps, he is at first hopeful that god will help them.  After he has been there for long enough he starts wondering how god, who to him, could control everything, could let this happen, and why god, who, in his opinion, had created everything, would create something so horrible for them to suffer in.  He wondered if it was a punishment, but they had not done anything wrong.  Others around him said it was a test of their faith, and that they had to stay strong.  But why would a test be so terrible?  One Rosh Hashanah, Everyone else at the camp is praying, and talking; the people are brought together by the holiday, it is something they all have in common.  But Eliezer just does not believe in god anymore because of what he has been through.  One of the most faithful had stopped believing, thinking that if there was a god, he could not do something this terrible.  That was how bad the concentration camp experience was, he gave up in one of the most important parts of his life. 

     I also thought it was sad how the horrific experiences people endured caused them to separate even from their family member's, and it became an everyone for themselves type of situation.  The book described a boy killing his father for a scrap of bread, or someone purposefully leaving their father behind on a "death march," only because his dad would slow him down, the father actually ended up surviving.  But of course, the people kind of had to think only for themselves.  To a certain extent though, it definitely does not justify killing your father for a little piece of bread.  There was almost no food, and they were all living in awful conditions.  Being generous, doing things like giving food to people who at the time needed it more than they did, would have eventually killed them.  

     Overall , I loved the book Night.  It was an incredible account of the monstrous things that really went on inside of concentration camps like Auschwitz or Buchenwald, and how they forever changed people.