Clemens An
Artifact (Picture #22): Available
Passage “One day, as we returned from work….That night, the soup tasted of corpses” (Wiesel 64-65).
“The Silent Horror of the Death Camps”
The Nazis were infamous for their concentration camps which were responsible for the mass murder of the Jewish people. They completely violated every rule of humanity and they not only changed the lives of Jewish people but also everyone on the face of this planet. These atrocious camps had a filthy and terrible reputation. In Night by Elie Wiesel, the narrator describes to us of an execution that takes place and also describes the sheer horror that occurs. In one photograph, there is a concentration camp prisoner slowly dying a painful horrific death. Both the passage and the picture gives a message of how cruel the concentration camps were to a human being and how dehumanized these individuals became at these camps. Another connection is that prisoners were suffering in horrific ways and the prisoners had to remain silent and not retaliate because they were overcome with fear and weakness.
The picture shows a weak dying man in rags with his life slowly slipping away. He is starving and is too weak to sit up, he clearly has been terribly treated. The picture symbolizes the pure brutality and the horror that occurred to all the people in these concentration camps. On a dirt floor with bodies surrounding him, the individual seems like he is ready to give up his life. This face shows the trauma that he has been through and his eyes show the despair, fear, and torture he’s seen and witnessed. His body is too weak to even speak of his pain so he silently endures the pain. For one human to do this upon another human just pathetically brings insult to our human dignity.
The picture shows a weak dying man in rags with his life slowly slipping away. He is starving and is too weak to sit up, he clearly has been terribly treated. The picture symbolizes the pure brutality and the horror that occurred to all the people in these concentration camps. On a dirt floor with bodies surrounding him, the individual seems like he is ready to give up his life. This face shows the trauma that he has been through and his eyes show the despair, fear, and torture he’s seen and witnessed. His body is too weak to even speak of his pain so he silently endures the pain. For one human to do this upon another human just pathetically brings insult to our human dignity.
Elie Wiesel is a prisoner that witnesses the execution of three other prisoners. This passage clearly demonstrates the autocracies that the prisoners went through. The passage starts with the narrator returning from work and seeing three black ravens. These three ravens foreshadow the three individuals that will be executed. The three ravens also symbolizes the darkness that will be brought upon to the three individuals. One of those three individuals is a young child who is referred as a sad angel. The boy being referred as an angel symbolizes his innocence and his vulnerability. As Elie continues to describe the execution, his tone seems very weak and gloomy because he can’t do anything to help the child and the other individuals. Elie is forced to watch the murder of a child in silence. When the hanging occurred the two men were described “Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish” (Wiesel 64). This gruesome statement uses imagery to represent the harsh reality of death. This imagery also emphasizes the experience Elie had with death. Elie then goes on to explain that the young child is still hanging from the rope for more than half and hour lingering between life and death. This occurrence is symbolizing the cruelty and the horrific acts that the prisoners had to endure. Also the child still living while being hung is juxtaposed with the two men who died instantly. This contrast is emphasizing how the men had quick deaths while the child is horrendously suffering a long and painful death. While the child was dying one man was asking where God was. Elie responded inside himself “This is where___hanging here from this gallows…” (Wiesel 65). Elie is stating that the child is God who is hanging and drying from this gallow. This can be perceived as an allusion to Jesus being hung on the cross. By Elie stating this, he also symbolizes his weakening in his faith and religion because God is dying inside of him slowly. Finally as Elie taste his soup he states that it tastes like corpses which simply symbolizes his sad emotions at that moment and it symbolizes the murder that just took place. The concentration camp changed the individual in the picture and Elie Wiesel as a person and they will never be the same after all the things they witnessed in the concentration camps.
