Matt Lynch
2-28-99
Per.4
English

Journal on the Second Half of:
Night

The novel, Night by Elie Wiesel is the disturbing and brutally honest memoir of the author’s time spent in various Nazi concentration camps during World War Two. This book gives the reader a glance into the inferno of these camps that most readers will thankfully never know. The events described in the novel go past the simple concept of a minority living in a majority culture. These are the events of the holocaust and involve the actual exploitation and attempted extermination of the Jewish minority in Europe and if Hitler had his way, the globe.
Wiesel draws from his childhood memories which are surprisingly full of detail, one would not expect such detail to be involved when talking of events that had happened twenty years earlier. However these events were probably the most traumatic ones that anybody could ever be a part of and would thus result in traumatic recollections, that last a lifetime. These of course are the detestable and wretched acts against the Jews of Europe during this time period.
The second half of the book takes place mainly in the concentration camps where the still young Wiesel is forced to watch and take place the disturbing images of the Holocaust. At his first camp his mother and three sisters are taken away, never to be seen by him again. This becomes a theme of the book, nothing is permanent anymore. The quiet life that young Elie lived as a child in his village of Sighet has been destroyed and he will never again see the majority of his family. From here to the end of the book at every major turning point the reader is reminded of the loss of permanence and therefore the loss of history in everything. Whether it’s the constant movement of Elie and his father from one camp to another, or the bombardment of false rumors regarding their salvation, nothing remains the same for Elie and his father. This permanence in life is something that we all take for granted and it is until we are faced with an adversity perhaps not as horrifying as this one, but an adversity none the less is it that one sees how uncomfortable this violent change makes us. It is the ones who are able to overcome this that are the champions of the human spirit.
Eventually Wiesel overcomes and reaches it to the end of the war alive, but he has now become a skeleton of his former self. He walks away from this experience a changed man and even now shrugs off the religion that he so adamately embraced as a child, feeling that if there was a God none of this would have happened. But that is why Hitler was so ruthless in his ways, he stole the beliefs of an entire race of people by creating a cruelty that has never been seen on this earth before and hopefully never will be again.