Night Elie Wiesel Night Essay

Words: 548
Pages: 3

For my project, I chose to create a small sculpture depicting a hand clutching a paper man and multiple golden stars. My sculpture symbolizes elements of the novel Night, and the author’s experience as a Jewish prisoner in several concentration camps during the events of the Holocaust. The paper man in my artwork represents the subject and author of Night; Elie Wiesel. Elie’s defeated-looking posture and hidden face symbolizes the effects of his time imprisoned in the concentration camps. During the book, Elie witnesses the brutal deaths of countless people, including the agonizing passing of his father and the thoughtless murder of infants as they are thrown into the fires of the crematorium. Horrified by what he has seen, Elie loses his faith in God, believing that the divine being has abandoned humanity by allowing these events to occur. My drawing expresses the deep and painful emotions of powerlessness, anger, guilt, and sadness that Elie feels after …show more content…
Towards the end of the book, Elie, along with the other prisoners of the Buna concentration camp, is forced to march several miles to the Gleiwitz camp (and later to Buchenwald) in the freezing cold of winter. During this time, Elie becomes so physically and mentally weak that he almost walks through Death’s door, and no longer cares about his survival. The thinness of the paper shows this concept, as Elie’s existence is close to being torn in half. In my creation, the golden stars that lie in the palm of the red hand represent the lives of Jewish prisoners and citizens during the events of the Holocaust. Elie and many other Jews were forced to wear a Star of David when in public to identify them as Jewish. The stars’ scrunched appearance represents the dead corpses of Jewish prisoners that Elie is faced with while in the concentration