Dicton and Disaster

Night – the breaking point of our sanity, the inevitable transformation from day to day, enveloping dusk, creating dawn – leaving the hopeless citizens of Sighet to question their values, their moral instincts, as God’s everlasting grace, no longer remains an essential building block of Jewish culture. As the Nazi’s continue to progress, working their way through Jewish communities, capturing, destroying, and exiling innocent victims as they go, author Elie Wiesel of the novel Night, paints pictures in the mind of the reader with beautiful imagery and crafted diction; in order to give a better understanding of the emotional journey the Jew’s encountered, when taken into the authoritative arms of the Germans.

Covering up their inhumane intentions, the German’s masked their sins with false accounts of sincerity. Wiesel brings attention particularly to an instance regarding a woman’s encounter with a German soldier on the home front. After moving in with the woman and her family, Wiesel states that he had heard, “he was a charming man, calm, likeable, and polite” (10). Three days after moving in, the soldier had purchased a box of chocolates for the Jewish woman, presenting himself as a respectable human being, without evil ever taking capacity in his twisted mind. Only days later, “two ghettos were created in Sighet” (11). The Jew’s took this as a grain of salt. Maybe this was for the better? After all they were still all together weren’t they? It wasn’t until the Germans took severe action, placing Jew’s in cattle cars as if they were the animals themselves, taking them to an unknown place where they all were to face their final solution – death. Throughout this section of the novel, regarding the departure from their homes and their arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel’s simple, yet powerful diction helps to illustrate the reactions of the people and their surroundings. Their greeting was not from those who worked there, but rather “the smell of burning flesh” (28). The burning, the killing, the mass murder of their own kind, represents the descent to savagery the Nazi party must have endured in order to find pleasure in such inhumane anguish.

What does it mean to be an adult?

Growing up, innocence overtakes youthful minds, creating dreamlike versions of reality. Everything is perfect and nothing could possibly go wrong, for the toughest decision that had to be made was who would be today’s playmate at recess, or what color crayon would successfully complete the latest masterpiece. This innocence however, slowly begins to fade, as magic no longer remains the center of creation. In the novel All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque proposes the question as to what was the cause of this loss of youthfulness. What could have possibly transformed easygoing children into savages on their road to adulthood? Remarque’s character development makes it clear that the reactions to traumatic experiences and possible hardships along the way remain the main factor that truly separates the boys from the men.

Paul, a boy nearing the end of his teenage years, takes his love for his country to the battlefield, risking his life as he chooses to do so. “[He] [is] twenty years old; yet [he] [knows] nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.” (263) Upon enlisting in the war, Paul never thought that a lack of food, painful wounds, and death of not only the enemy, but comrades as well, would come along with it. He drives himself nearly to insanity as he soon becomes comfortable with the sins that he is committing. While on the front he experiences his first true killing stating, “This is the first time I have killed with my hands, whom I can see close at hand, whose death is my doing.” (221) Granted, “Life is short;” (139) however, when it comes to an end, which would a soldier rather have flash before his eyes? His great memories? Or rather the murders and wrong actions that he has achieved? These experiences and the process of acceptance afterwards is what illustrates the level of maturity necessary in order to successfully complete the transformation from childhood to adulthood, a transformation that Paul and the rest of the men in his unit, have greatly failed.