Elie Wiesel's Holocaust Memoir “Night”

 Elie Wiesel's Holocaust Memoir “Night”

In the Holocaust memoir "Elie Wiesel Night" (non-fiction) Elie Wiesel uses a range of language features to make you feel emotion, and sympathy towards the people in this book. It tells a heartbreaking story of a 15 year old Jewish kid, being sent to a concentration camp. He experienced many traumatic events. His experience changed him, as well as the way he views the world. He would have made this book to help educate others on what happened in the Holocaust, and to hope to prevent it from happening again. In this essay I will point out the use of multiple ellipses, metaphors, sentence structure, and the use of multiple question marks.

One event in this book that impacted me emotionally, is the day that Idek was furious and beat Elie for no good reason. Elie says "He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again," pg 53 par 1. After Ellie had crawled back to his station the French girl offered him a few encouraging words. "Bite your lips, little brother. . . Don't cry. keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now. . . wait. Clench your teeth and wait. . ." pg 53 par 4. This might not show the significance of these few words, however she risked her life to say this, as the Kapo did not know that she could speak fluent German. Had they known this they might have assumed she was a Jew. She could have been killed. In this text the author used multiple ellipsis to inflect sadness upon the readers. Treating another human being like a dog is not right. It makes me feel terrified seeing as this event could happen again.

Another event that makes great use of repetition to inflict mental harm is when they were going to be forced to leave Buna. It was the last night again. Elie expresses his feelings by saying "It was cold. We got into our bunks. The last night in Buna. Once more, the last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the cattle car, and now, the last night in Buna. How much longer would our lives be lived from one "last night" to the next?" pg 83 par 2. In this quote the author uses repetition, and makes good use of simple, and complex sentence structures. Using these language features at this point in the book sparks compassion for the characters.

The last event that I found to be the most emotionally triggering was when Ellie, and his father were shoved into the barrack, after running from the camp in Buna. Where the dead, and living, combined were piled on top of each other. He could hear a faint voice of someone he remembered. Juliek's voice. The boy from Buna who was a part of the orchestra that played a military march. He cried out from underneath Elie "Mercy!"pg 93 par 2. He begged Elie to stop crushing him, because he was scared his violin would break. The poor kid had run with his violin over 20 km. Elie thought he was a fool to carry an instrument all that way, but those thoughts went silent when he heard the faint sound of a bow gliding over the strings. " A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at his own grave? Or was this a hallucination?" I love this piece of text as it inflicts sympathy on the reader. The language feature I wanted to point out here is the use of question marks to show how confused, and inflicted Elie is by Juliek’s actions.

I think this book has been written to show and help educate others on how the victims of the Holocaust lived. It shows how they were treated, and why this event should never happen again; to any kind of person. This book is emotionally triggering, and it makes you feel sympathy for the people who were forced to live in a concentration camp. Overall I think that this is a great book to read as it teaches us more, rather than just talking about it.