Night Blog

             In the book Night Elie, the narrator's point of view on god changes as he is transferred from camp to camp. In his earlier days, Elie was very religious. In the memoir he had stated, "I continued to devote myself to my studies, Talmud during the day and Kabbalah at night." This represents how he was so devoted that he spent both night and day studying the religion. However once Elie was transferred from camp to camp, being dehumanized made a very large hole in him. While all the other men in the camp think God's challenging them, Elie just gets mad at God for not helping them escape living hell. As in the later chapters, Elie had said, "I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames." This meant that he didn't believe in God anymore. With all the horrid events that surrounded him day and night he stopped believing that God would help them as when ever they looked to him for guidance, nothing ever happened.

             One emotion Elie, had felt would be fear. He, as most of the other men of the camps all felt fear. The fear of having your loved one killed, the fear of being burned in the fires, there was always fear around them, one way or another. As when Elie's father had been chosen to stay back for the second selection, Elie had said, "I was afraid of finding myself alone that evening. How good it would be to die right here!" I would say that Elie's greatest fear would be losing his father. As he's the only family he has left, after being separated from him mom and sister.

             Another emotion Elie had felt would be anger. This anger was not directed at the SS guards, well some of it was, but who it was directed at was God. As explained earlier, Elie was very angry at the fact that God didn't help these people. How he didn't stop children being thrown into the fires. Or how he didn't stop that young boy from dying during those hangings. Elie is starting to reject that God is even there. For example when the men were praying to God as the new year approached and Elie has thought, "My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God..." With everything happening around him, nothing would ever be the same. His total faith in God and been destroyed. For a person to be so religious, and then turn to say he lived in a world without God, it truly shows how horrid that time period was. Not just for Elie, but for all of the Jewish people in concentration camps.