One of the few things Wiesel describes about his childhood and life before the Holocaust is his faith. At the end of the memoir, Wiesel describes himself in the mirror as "a corpse" gazing back at himself. In what ways did Wiesel die during the Holocaust .
Response.
Faith is described as the "complete trust or confidence in someone or something." In the beginning of "Night," Elie is a very innocent child and he's very involved with his religion, Judaism. After he is taken away from his home he is stripped of this innocence , his faith in his family died and he no longer believed in his religion like he did before he went to the camps. Though Elie did not actually die during the Holocaust, he metaphorically did due to the lost of all of these things. Elie went from a hopeful young boy to, as he describes it, a corpse. The first way Wiesel dies during the Holocaust is that in which his faith in his family dies. "It's too late to save your old father, I said to myself" "Here every man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father" "I did not move, what happened to me My father had just been struck , before my very eyes , and I had not flickered an eyelid" This is the point in the story in which you see Elie realising he can't save his family. Wiesel feels immensely guilty but he knows that if he wants to live he would now need to watch out for himself. Elie's father has just been hit, but Elie does nothing, he doesn't know what has happened to him. "No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!" After his father dies the one of the feelings Elie feels is a sense of relief, knowing he won't have to look after his sick father anymore.