The book Night by Elie Wiesel tells a very mooving story about Holocaust. A main character Eliezer struggles very hard with his faith in kind God that he knew from early childhood, as his strong faith in his mighty God was unconditionally. But this is challenged by the horrible experiences that together with the other Jewish people he was facing in the concentration camp. At first Elie had absolute believe in God (Wiesel 1), but firther in the story when he enters the concentration camp, his belief in God is less strong. He did not deny Him but douted his absolute justice.
With a bad things that happened to him, Elies faith is shaped by the people that he is with in the camp. A good exsample is rabbi Elihou. He gives people hope that things will be better some day. His presense alone give the people real peace and comfort. Elie and his father have several challenges when he almost losed his father but in a strange change of event they would be together after they survived the selection. Even when his father was going to be throuwn out of the moving car because they thought that he died, Elie made them trust that he was still alive and he was left. God’s hand had seen them go throught the horrible experiences. On the trip to Buchenwald, it so happen that very many people died on the way but Elie and his father survived the torture trial (Wiesel 89)
Elie starts to dout God because they suffered so much and he says that for the very first time he felt a rebel inside of him and he did not see a reason why he should bless His name because He was silent when they needed Him most and therefore Elie thought that he had nothing to thank to (Wiesel 31). His father is one of the main persons who form his doubt in God. For exsample, when he was getting old and weak, Elie remembers to say that it was too late to save his father (Wiesel105). They part with his mother and sisters and lost hope to mitting them again (Wiesel 27). He began to think that he lost his faith in the flame (Wiesel 32). At one moment Elie felt all alone in the world and that God was not there at all. (Wiesel65). Elie felt that if God didn’t save his childrens then no one else would do that. His lack of believe in God made him to believe more in Adolf Hitler than he did God (Wiesel 77).
With such experiences in the hands of the Nazi in the concentration camps, Elie’s believe and trust in God were so in dout that he didn’t believe God ever exsisted and watched him and the rest of the Jewish people go through the awful life they were having in the camps. Elie and rest of the people are human and its human nature to dout our believes when we have experiences like this. It is in this way true that Elie didn’t want to agree to a description of a God who has all strenth, knowledge and kindness, but who sat back and watched them go through that horror. But at the end of the day, having survived the trial, he is not the same person, the same innocent child and believer that we meet in the begining of the book, he changed and his thought of God is also another.
He was in all this trouble, heartache and pain, there are a few moment where there seem to exsist the power of faith and disbelieve and this is seen more especially with the kind of relationship between Eliezer and his father. Elie stays true to the relationship and blood ties and tries not regarding on anything to save his father. At times, he risks his own life just to save his father from the group of men who are going to be killed. But the opposite happens to the whole Jewish group of people and God. It goes against logic when God, their God could not save them when they needed him most and this is why people like Elie start to douting his exsistence. The entire story is happening around the problems the Jewish people had in the concentration camps. It is true to say that the agreement between God and his people was breaken and he was now not the strong, kind and knowing everything God they trusted in all their lifes, at least before Holocaust.
The entire experience that the Jewish people had when they were in the concentration camps with Nazis was very painful and horrible. Throught the experiences of the Jewish people Wiesel shows a test of what a agreement is really. It is difficult to understand that in all that, God was taking care of his people just like Elie was looking after and protecting his father spetially when he put his own life for him. In all that he goes through, it is agreeable that we should agree to take care of each other as he did his father even in the middle of genocide.
Work Cited
Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantam Books 1982
