Tuesday, March 6, 2012

     In the Night reading, there are many quotes that stood out to me.  During their time at the concentration camp, their was a raid.  One of the quotes that caught my attention was, "To watch that factory go up in flames- what revenge!  We were not afraid.  And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks it would have claimed hundreds of inmates' lives.  But we no longer feared death... Every bomb that hit filled us with joy, gave us new confidence," (p60).  Even though bombs were dropping very close to where they were, the inmates at the concentration camps were happy with the explosions.  They didn't mind to die from a bomb in the attempts of getting rescued.  As long as they don't die from one of the chambers within the camp, they must feel like they won over the Germans.  Wiesel says that "every bomb that hits fills them with joy" because each bomb is one step closer to being liberated.  Another quote that intrigued me was "The thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitz and Birkenau, in the crematoria, no longer troubled me.  But this boy, leaning against his gallows, upset me deeply," (p62)  As if watching others go into the crematoria and other ways of killing the inmates wasn't bad enough, if caught doing something against the rules of the camp, you may be hanged.  The person hanged in the previous quote was just a boy and he was being hanged.  Wiesel describes how the crematoria doesn't bother him as much as watching someone be hanged.   The final quote is "But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing.  He was still alive when I passed him" (p65).  In this last quote, a boy is hanged, but he does not have a quick death.  Instead, because he is too light, his weight didnt cause the rope to rapidly break his neck and kill him.  He was suffocating by hanging from the rope.  It apalled me as I was reading to realize that even though the soldiers and everyone knew he was still alive, know one either helped him,  nor put him out of his misery.  Of all the ways to die, suffocating must be the most horriffic because it is a slow, gruesome death.  As seen by this evidence, many of the quotes in Night can trigger a reader to have deep thoughts, and relate themselves to the text.

1 comment:

  1. Kim, the quotes that you said stuck out to you the most were ones that I distinctly remember reading and actually being astonished at what was happening. The part about the young boy being hung was truly sickening for me to read. As I was reading I could picture a little kid being scared as ever and it honestly scared me to read. Not only did the boy have to die by being hung in front of everyone, but he did not even die instantly. Like you said, it was suffocating him which is even worse.

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