In the book Night, Elie Wiesel reflects on his first night in the concentration camps where the Nazis have taken him. He says, "Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust" (Night, pg. 43). This is perhaps one of the most famous quotes from the book, because it chronicles the moments after Eliezer realizes that he has survived the first introduction into the camp, and it introduces the realization that to survive does not mean to truly live.
In these moments, Eliezer learns what it means to lose faith in a life where his God has seemingly forsaken him. Essentially, he is having a spiritual crisis, brought about by the horrors that he has witnessed in the moments leading up to this reflection. Until he was taken by the Nazis, he lived in relative safety and comfort; now, however, he has experienced a total loss of control over his own fate and the fate of others like him.
He feels abandoned by God, abandoned by the world, and powerless in the face of injustice. These feelings are enough to cause him to feel that he has lost faith in his God. Because he had lived so long with the belief that God is just and fair and that bad things do not happen to innocent people, he was deeply shocked at the inhumanity he had witnessed. At that point, he realized that something inside him had changed; he no longer felt that the world was safe for him to live in. He felt that his soul had been crushed, even if his body lived on.
Robbed of the desire to carry on living in a world where such things were possible and deeply angry at a God who he felt had betrayed the Jews, he admits that these memories will stay with him, even if he must live as long as God himself.
Monday, April 23, 2012
On page 43, what does Elie Wiesel mean when he says his soul has been murdered?
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