Night, by Elie Weisel, is a telling of the Holocaust through the eyes of Elie Weisel as a twelve year old boy. Eliezer is "parallel of Weisel himself". As an author, he uses symbolism through his characters to tell the story of life in a concentration camp during World War II. Foreshadowing events to come, Weisel unravels the horrors of Auschwitz and camps like it. The characters in Night reveal much about the Jewish people who lived out the days of the Holocaust in concentration camps. Each character has his/her own experience in the Holocaust, however Weisel adds symbolism to each character to portray, his motif.
Through Eliezer, one can begin to understand why many Jews lost their faith in God during their days at the concentration camps. Another character, Akiba Drummer, in the story loses his faith. Both Eliezer and Akiba have very strong faith in their beliefs in the beginning of the story, but by the end, all their faith in god is lost.
Beadle & Brown depart (LOC)
Jewish slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentrat...
Auschwitz concentration camp, arrival of Hungarian...Weisel shows how the Holocaust had taken the covenant with god away from the Jewish people.
Shlomo, Eliezer's father, Rabbi Eliahou and his son demonstrate how family ties lose their meaning inside the concentration camps. Though Eliezer loves his father, he begins to grow weary of taking care of Shlomo when Shlomo gets sick. It becomes obvious that Rabbi Eliahou's son forgets family ties completely when he beats and kills his own father over a piece of bread.
The concentration camps changed the Jews who lived in them. Franek, the Polish foreman, in a run-in with Eliezer, turns into someone completely different --"This sympathetic, intelligent youth was suddenly no longer the same person" (52). Moshe the Beadle is among one of the first in the community to get deported,