Isabel - Blog Post #5

I think the way reading and learning about genocide over the past few weeks has changed me is it made me slightly question the goodness of humanity. It’s really sad to think that there are so many people who would willingly participate in something like the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. Night did a really good job in making me have more empathy towards everything that happened, as it was in first person and made it easier to connect to the events that took place. Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech was extremely inspiring, and it was very moving and selfless to have him dedicate the award to all victims of the Holocaust.

Life is Beautiful also helped connect more emotions to everything, and it made it seem more realistic. I think the way Life is Beautiful helped to connect emotions is that it's more relatable than the other stories we learned about. It started out just like a normal cliché romance movie (the type that we've all seen before), but it became a tragedy. Many of us can relate to the happy family part in the beginning, so to see it get that sad so fast was heartbreaking. Overall, learning about the holocaust has been a very sad yet interesting experience.

Isabel - Blog Post #4

I watched the blooming countryside flit by

rolling down the road

Rhythmic pounding of the wheels on the tracks

as the train raced through the night

The hours went by

and the night seemed endless

Snow was falling heavily

under cover of darkness

under a silent sky

I prayed for the night to pass quickly

But it snowed on and on

My fate was unknown

My gaze remained fixed

on the landscape beside me

and I was all alone in the world

Isabel - Blog Post #3

In this picture, a guard beats a prisoner while the other ones watch. To me it’s a very heartbreaking scene, especially when you take into consideration that the others probably want to help, but they’d be punished as well.

Isabel - Blog Post #2

A common theme that appears throughout Night is the Jewish people slowly losing their faith and trust in God. For example, at the beginning Moishe the Beadle was very religious and practiced it regularly. However, after he came back from the camp he acted very differently: “Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen.” (7). You can understand how what Moishe saw affected him, he had been traumatized and was no longer enthusiastic about religion.

Later on in the book, Eliezer begins to distrust God.

Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar? (67)

This is significant because at the start Eliezer had full faith in God, but now he sees no reason to trust or even like Him. In his eyes, God is at fault for the Holocaust. Another example of someone losing faith in God is this: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." (81). To me, this can be taken as kind of a jab at God. Normally, when you ask a religious person who they have the most in faith in they would say God, but to have someone say Hitler tells a lot about what’s happened to their faith.

Blog Post #1 - Isabel

I found this chapter very sad, but at the same time intriguing. One passage in particular that I found meaningful was: “There no longer was any distinction between rich and poor, notables and the others; we were all people condemned to the same fate—still unknown.” (21). I think this passage really made me realize how much everyone’s lives had changed so quickly. People went from being the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor to just being themselves. I noticed that for a good part of the chapter, the narrative focused less on Eliezer’s thoughts and feelings and more on what was happening around him and other people’s reactions. Also, rather than every scene being set at around the same time, they were more like moments spanning over multiple years. This can be shown especially by the sections starting with things like “Spring 1944” (8), or “The eight days of Passover” (10). I liked this because it made it easier to see the process of how things slowly started to go downhill, and to see how everyone’s mood and mindset began to change over time.