In his first and most famous work, Night, Elie Wiesel relives his experience in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Wiesel, who was born and raised a devout Jew and excelled in Talmudic and spiritual studies, recounts his loss of freedom, innocence, family and finally faith. One of the successes of Night as a human document is that it shows not only the misdeeds of the oppressors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but also what evil can do to man. Wiesel saw good men transformed by cruelty into “unchained beasts of prey” (101). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The most important theme of the book is how evil transforms and distorts man. While the horrors of the Nazi regime are depicted in Night, it is the evil committed by fellow Jews and victims of the Nazis that takes center stage in this work. From the start of his stay in Auschwitz, Wiesel suffered the worst abuses from his fellow prisoners. In the first barracks where Wiesel stayed, former inmates waited to beat new arrivals indiscriminately with sticks (35). This behavior, constituting not only a lack of compassion but also anger and violence towards other humans, appears continually throughout the Night. After only a few days at the Buna construction site, Wiesel himself began to exhibit this behavior. The dentist who was going to remove Wiesel's gold crown was arrested for taking gold for himself and was going to be hanged. Wiesel not only felt neither pity nor remorse for the dentist, but he was also happy. In the concentration camp, there was no room for concern for others or abstract notions like compassion; all that existed was your own life and your own empty stomach (51-52). As the tide of the war turned against the Nazis, concentration camp prisoners were subjected to more horror and suffering. As the Allied troops moved towards Buna, the prisoners were forced to evacuate, but not before clearing the barracks: "For the liberating army." Let them know that men lived here, not pigs. (84) This distinction between men and animals disappears, however, when Wiesel describes the scene in which civilians throw bread crumbs into one of the cattle cars transporting the prisoners to the next concentration camp. The prisoners, so hungry for food, violently throw themselves at each other and fight over small crumbs of food. Wiesel actually sees a son strangling his own father for a crust of bread (101). At this point in the book, it is clear that everything that distinguishes us from animals and men from pigs has disappeared. The effect of the concentration camp experience was to systematically strip prisoners of what made them human: their individuality, their compassion and their remorse. What remained was simply the body, more specifically the empty stomach, and the will to protect the pathetic life he had left. For Wiesel, an important aspect of the evil experienced seemed to be man's refusal to accept it, or even to recognize it. what it is. Before the native Jews of Sighet began to be persecuted, all foreign-born Jews were forced to leave. Moishe the Beadle returns from a near-death experience at the hands of the Nazis and seeks to share his knowledge of their evil with his fellow Jews. It was not easy for the people of Sighet, still living their ordinary lives, to conceptualize the evil proclaimed by Moishe the Beadle, andSince he had been poor and lower class, it was much easier for him to be called crazy. (6-7). Once the fascist regime took power in Transylvania and Jews were forced to live in ghettos, some still did not want to believe that the worst was possible: “As far as I am concerned, this whole affair is a big deal. prank… They just want to steal our valuables and jewelry” (21). Perhaps it was only when the residents of Sighet were herded into transport that some began to doubt that everything was not going well. Mrs. Schächter, an elderly woman in the transport, started shouting: “Jews, listen to me, I see a fire!” I see flames, huge flames! At first, the people crowded into the cattle car took pity on her, but as her screams became more maniacal, so did the other passengers' need to silence her. In their desire to calm her, and perhaps assuage the doubt in themselves, the normally peaceful people who would have been her friends and neighbors in Sighet beat and tied her up (25-26). Once the cattle car emptied its load of people at Birkenau, the reality of evil that the people of Sighet had been unwilling to accept finally dawned on them. One inmate shouted at the arriving Jews: “You should have hanged yourself instead of coming here.” Didn't you know what awaited you here in Auschwitz? You didn't know that? In 1944? (30) Evil often remains a mystery because we are too afraid to explore its real possibilities. The question of why evil and suffering exist is an important question for anyone confronted with the reality of evil. In Night, this is a difficult question for a devout Jew to answer. Being a very religious person, you have to reconcile the reality of what is happening with the type of God you believe in. Some at Auschwitz believed that perhaps they were being punished for the sins of the Jewish people. Others thought, “God is testing us.” He wants to see if we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within us” (45). Wiesel, on the other hand, was angered by what he saw as God's silence: "Why should I hallow His name?" The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, has chosen to remain silent. What did we need to thank him for? »(33) Wiesel compares himself to the biblical character Job. Job was an innocent and righteous man who still suffered, even though he lived a life devoted to God. He challenged the assumption that suffering was a punishment for sins, since he had committed none. Job is able to find peace in realizing that even though there is no explanation for the suffering, God is present in Job's suffering just as He is in his blessings. Thanks to this reaffirmed faith in the presence of God in his life, Job manages to find peace with his pain. But for Wiesel, even the story of Job does not bring peace. Wiesel found God completely absent from Auschwitz. It only seems after writing Night that Wiesel found some sort of peace with what had happened. Wiesel, as he stated in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, tried to make something of the life he was fortunate enough to lead in the concentration camps. As Wiesel said: “I tried to keep the memory alive…We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim” (118). It seems that for Wiesel, the evil he experienced had at least one positive result: he could prevent such evil from happening again. This idea of ​​suffering as a renewing or teaching experience is common in later Jewish thought and Christianity. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get now.