Elie Wiesel Night Reflection

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Pages: 3

Firstly, the self confidence that the Jews had preserved within themselves died immediately. To begin, when entering the concentration camps, the Jews were from then on called by number as oppose to by name. Elie explains this change when he mentions “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel, p.42). The first step taken to rid the Jews of their dignity was to take their names, so they would have no control over who they were, even something as small as what they were called. Next, the prisoners were treated and acted as if they were animals. Elie was distraught when he wrote “a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few …show more content…
They had transformed into wild animals, something they would never have been proud of to become. Finally, Elie and his fellow prisoners had been treated so poorly that they were ridiculed into believing that they were worthless. Primo Levi, also a prisoner of the concentration camp, describes how he was treated in the camps by stating “We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death…” (Levi, p.41). Primo’s experience was just as terrifying and horrific as Elie’s, as they both were treated as scum of the earth, allowing them to believe they were degenerate creatures, and started to separate themselves from their humanity. With the Nazis degrading the Jews, Elie and many other prisoners lost their dignity, and began acting and perceiving themselves less and less and human …show more content…
First, Elie’s self-love quickly dimished, provoking him to alter his decisions and become a completely different person. Estess analyses Elie’s feelings as he articulates “[Elie’s] relationship to himself- and by this is meant his understanding of himself-is called into question on the first night at Auschwitz. He says… ‘The child I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it’” (Estess, p.94). Elie hated who he had become and the choices he had made, losing all the love he had had for himself. Then, Elie’s love for his teacher, Moshe the Beadle, ceased to exist. After Moshe returned from the the concentration camps, he tried to warn others of what was happening, yet many, including Elie “did not believe him… all I felt was pity” (Wiesel, p.7). Elie had once loved and looked up to Moshe, but had lost his role model when his affection for Moshe vanished, causing Elie to struggle to make the proper decisions and remain human. Lastly, many father and son bonds had been broken in the concentration camps by the children making choices that were inhuman. Estess explains what the sons had done when he specifies “Eliezer watches one young man kill his father for a piece of bread; he sees another, Rabbi Eliahou’s son, run off and leave his father in the snow” (Estess, p.96). The conditions of