"There remained only a shape that looked at me. A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it". To what extent would you argue that Elie is destroyed by the experiences he recounts in Night?.
Before the Germans arrive at Sighet, night time is for Elie a time of spiritual and physical renewal. It is a time of studying religious texts, of prayer, and of restful sleep. This comforting sense of night is forever lost as Elie experiences the horrible, dreadful nights of the concentration camps; those experiences are the ones, which allowed a dark flame to enter his soul and devour it, destroying him forever. Night begins in 1941, when, the narrator of the story, Elie, is twelve years old. Having grown up in a little town called Sighet in Transylvania, Elie is a studious, deeply religious boy with a loving family consisting of his parents and three sisters. One day, Moshe the Beadle, a Jew from Sighet, deported in 1942, with whom Elie had once studied the Cabbala, comes back and warns the town of the impending dangers of the German army. No one listens and years pass by. But by 1944, Germans are already in the town of Sighet and they set up ghettos for the Jews. After a while, the Germans begin the deportation of the Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. The overwhelming sense of Elie's experiences during the first day of camp is that it is like a nightmare. As Elie and the other prisoners walk past the chimneys at Birkenau, they stand motionless, unable to comprehend the sights: "We stayed motionless, petrified. Surely it was all a nightmare? An unimaginable nightmare?" (Chapter 3, pg. 28) Elie thinks he's dreaming. After pinching his face, in disbelief he utters, "How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? No, none of this could be true. It was a nightmare." (Chapter 3, pg. 30). They begin to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
