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What are some cause and effect relationships in Night by Elie Wiesel?
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In "Night," Elie Wiesel illustrates cause and effect through key events. The Jews of Sighet ignore Moishe the Beadle's warnings, leading to their eventual deportation to concentration camps. This complacency results in their capture and suffering. Another example is Elie's decision to feign illness to avoid losing his gold tooth, which ultimately saves it when the dentist is arrested. These choices underscore the critical nature of decisions during the Holocaust, highlighting the profound consequences of actions.
Night by Elie Wiesel has many “what if” moments—times of decision by different characters that produce several results ranging from catastrophic to salvific. The idea of cause and effect is an interesting one because in life, everything we do can be seen as a cause that leads to some effect, but there is no real way of knowing any alternative but what is and has happened.
For instance, the Jews of Sighet ignoring the warnings of Moishe the Beadle could be seen as a cause that leads to the effect of them being put into ghettos and eventually sent to the concentration camps. Moishe tries in vain to get the Jews to believe his story, but they refuse:
Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen....
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But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad. (chapter 1)
The Jews of Sighet, blinded by their comfortable lives, didn’t think that the Nazis were capable of committing the atrocity in the forest of Poland. However, Moishe tried to warn them nonetheless. His pleas fell on deaf ears, and eventually, he left town to save himself. As a result, almost none of the Jews were prepared when the Germans finally came to Hungary, and many people were put into the ghetto and willingly went to the concentration camps.
Another example of cause and effect could be when Elie goes to the dentist in Auschwitz and is to have his gold tooth extracted. He fakes a fever and can get more time. He can delay even further by being cooperative:
I went back to see him a week later. With the same excuse: I still was not feeling better. He did not seem surprised, and I don't know whether he believed me. Yet he most likely was pleased that I had come back on my own, as I had promised. He granted me a further delay. (chapter 4)
Elie chooses to feign an illness, which has the effect of getting him out of having to give up his tooth. He then decides to go back and again ask for an extension, which has the effect of him being given longer. After the second extension, the dentist is arrested for selling gold teeth, and Elie can keep his tooth longer until it can be used as a bargaining chip in another part of the memoir.
The cause and effect relationship of the choices in the story helps us to understand the significance of the situation facing Elie. Before the Holocaust, he had been a boy who prayed in the temple—someone who hadn’t faced real hardship. Suddenly, one day, he was thrust into a life or death situation that made every choice, every consequence, significantly more critical. Cause and effect are vital to the story because they are vital to life—every action we take bears significance because of the eventual outcome.
Elie Wiesel’s Night tells the story of Elie’s early life as a Holocaust victim in several Nazi concentration camps in the final year-and-a-half of World War II.
In the opening chapters of the book, Elie writes about the incremental power grab by the Nazis in his home of Sighet, Romania. Wiesel describes a cause and effect chain in which the cause, complacence by the Jews of Sighet, results in the effect, their easy capture, deportation, and imprisonment by the German Nazis, that drives the rest of the story.
The first event in this chain comes when Elie’s mentor is deported:
And then, one day all foreign Jews were expelled from Sighet. And Moshe the Beadle was a foreigner.
However, the Jews do not heed the warning:
The deportees were quickly forgotten.
As time goes on, the Jews continue to ignore more signs of their impending disaster:
- Moshe tells the story of the Nazi slaughter of the other Jews that were expelled with him.
- The Nazis show up on Sighet but appear to be friendly.
- The Nazis move the Jews into ghettos.
- The Nazis deport the Jews on trains to Poland.
During this time, Elie and his family, and many other Jews, had opportunities to escape. However, their choice to ignore the danger the resulted in their utltimate demise: when the Jews finally arrive in the concentration camps they realize once and for all that they have been fooling themselves.
To sum up, the causes are the Jews various refusals to recognize that serious trouble was coming in the form of the Nazis. The effect was their deportation, imprisonment, and for many, death.