Night Argumentative Essay Elie Wiesel, professor, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Holocaust survivor, husband, father, and best-selling author, was one of the world’s leading spokesmen on the Holocaust who “made it his life’s work to bear witness to the genocide committed by the Nazis in World War II.” In Wiesel’s memoir Night, he describes his haunting experiences throughout his captivity in Nazi Germany for the sole reason that he was a Jew. For years, Wiesel was held captive in a multitude of different concentration camps, and by writing this memoir, he is telling his story and ensuring that it lives on through generations. “To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (Wiesel xv).
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The 6 million Jews and millions of others who perished during the Holocaust deserve to be remembered, and by educating others, Wiesel ensures that their stories will live on. The horrors of the camp still haunt him even after his liberation. For instance, he gets constant reminders such as the throwing of bread at prisoners versus the throwing of coins at natives, which greatly disturbed him. “When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: “‘Please, don’t throw any more coins” (Wiesel 100). Even the simplest words such as “hunger, thirst, fear, transport, selection, fire, and chimney” bring him back to that traumatic moment in his life (Wiesel ix). Additionally, though remembering his father is important, it’s also a constant reminder of everything they went through and the resentment he felt toward his father before his death by not granting him his death wish. “It had been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body–yet I did not let him have his wish. I was afraid to say. Afraid of the blows, he
The 6 million Jews and millions of others who perished during the Holocaust deserve to be remembered, and by educating others, Wiesel ensures that their stories will live on. The horrors of the camp still haunt him even after his liberation. For instance, he gets constant reminders such as the throwing of bread at prisoners versus the throwing of coins at natives, which greatly disturbed him. “When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: “‘Please, don’t throw any more coins” (Wiesel 100). Even the simplest words such as “hunger, thirst, fear, transport, selection, fire, and chimney” bring him back to that traumatic moment in his life (Wiesel ix). Additionally, though remembering his father is important, it’s also a constant reminder of everything they went through and the resentment he felt toward his father before his death by not granting him his death wish. “It had been his last wish to have me next to him in his agony, at the moment when his soul was tearing itself from his lacerated body–yet I did not let him have his wish. I was afraid to say. Afraid of the blows, he