night essay- lauren m

hey, it's Madeleine. My friend and I have essays due Monday and need harsh critism..... Lauren is gonna log onto mine to check her comments....... we love you guys sooooooooooooooo much..... cu at cwp

this is Lauren's.......

“The race toward death had begun.” (page 8) That’s where Elie’s story begins, living a life that he enjoyed until they came. The Germans came, crammed them into ghettos then took them away. Night, by Elie Wiesel, is the story of a young boy who witnesses and survives the Holocaust. One of the major themes of this book is death. Death by fire, combat, and starvation and exhaustion are three examples of this theme.

“In the air that smell of burning flesh.” (page 26) Death by fire. As they walked off the train, leaving behind a life they knew to a life of terror and fear. The first thing that they noticed was the smell of burning flesh from the crematories. How they could burn innocent people is beyond me. Elie saw kids and babies getting thrown into the fire without a second glance. Where was humanity? And he could do nothing if he wanted to live. He saw bodies turn into smoke and ashes, life being destroyed. It stayed with him forever. Humanity only saw what it wanted to see, looking through rose colored glasses. When they took them off, what they saw shocked them.

“The audience stared at these skeletons of the men, fighting one another to the death for a mouthful.” (page 95) The Holocaust victims were giving very little to eat. They were starved. When they were going on the train to Buchenwald, they were giving no food. Of course, the Germans had plenty, but the victims, in their eyes, didn’t deserve food, they would die eventually. They were treated like animals. At one stop, a passer by threw bread into the cattle car they were on, a fight for the crumbs of bread, broke out. A battle of savages. The Germans watched on like it was an interesting sport. But the danger and starvation was real. He saw a son attack the father but in vain for others attacked the son. Both died, lying next to each other. Turned against one another when they should have been sticking together. This is the evil that the Holocaust inflicted upon families, upon friends, upon individuals.

“Only those who could still stand were able to get out.” (page 98) When the cattle cars reached Buchenwald, those who could stand left the transport cars. About 100 got into Elie’s cattle car, only a dozen came out alive. They was no proper buriel. They just left them, not caring about anything except about what happened to them. They were given no food which led to starvation and they were exhausted. Some just went to sleep and never woke up. It made grown men cry in rage, fear, and hopelessness. No one deserves to starve. Not to be fed because they thought you weren’t good enough. Plus the fact that they were beaten, treated ill and had to work, that is not a good combination. No one cared for the sick. Every time a new person needed in, someone else died. The weakest link, always the weakest.

In the camps they threw people into the fires. They pitted people against each other by letting them kill each other over food. They starved and exhausted them till their death, not many survived. Elie was liberated form Buchenwald. Inside him were memories of these horrible times. His parents, siblings, and most of his friends were dead. He wrote the book to preserve the memories of those dead, and to show the world that the Holocaust really did exist. In this amazing book, he captures the raw emotion of feelings he had to hide inside a teenager during this terrifying account in history. “‘You don’t understand,’ he said in despair. ‘You can’t understand.” (page 5) And we don’t.