The Holocaust was an appalling and atrocious genocide of the European Jewish people. Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor and the author of Night, a memoir about the murder of six million European Jews. He employed literary devices such as repetition, alliteration, negative construction, and first-person narration in his autobiography. The first-person narration makes Wiesel's writing more sorrowful because it makes it seem more real, bringing the book to life and encourages you to imagine yourself in his shoes. Wiesel's writing emotionally moved me, making me feel exceptionally lugubrious and sorrowful.
Deportees departing beyond the horizon aboard a train, where they were swiftly forgotten, was one of the first awful occurrences Elie witnessed. There were rumours that the deportees were in a town called Galicia, employed and content with their fate. "...crammed into cattle cars by the Hungarian police, they cried silently," is a statement that makes use of alliteration with the words 'crammed/cattle/cars' to emphasise how the Jews were being crammed into the cattle cars like animals. I was profoundly moved by it because I would never want to experience what it was like to see defenceless individuals being deported to a location where it was impossible to know whether they would survive or not.
In another incident, Elie and his father were standing before an SS officer who resembled all the other officers. vicious, but not unintelligent, and well-known. Elie was fifteen years old when the man questioned him about his age, but he claimed to be eighteen since another prisoner had instructed him to do so. The same was true of Elie's father, who was fifty but instructed him to claim to be forty. In the end, they were both directed to the left, where the crematorium was located. However, they were told to turn left again and proceed to the barracks, two steps from the crematorium. He had written a stirring prose poem by the time the conflict was over. "Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under the silent sky," was a quote from Elie's autobiography. The phrase "Never shall I forget" is repeated, so the technique employed for this quote is repetition. By employing this technique, it strengthens and expands the reader's view of the story he is telling. It had an emotional impact on me since I would never want to witness my family or any other person set on fire whilst they were still alive.
The father of Elie Wiesel, Shlomo Wiesel, developed a horrible illness as the war was coming to an end. Additionally, SS officers used wooden clubs to strike him in the head. "Elie" was Shlomo's final utterance; he cried out his name but did not respond. He was out of tears, so he refrained from crying, which bothered him. "No prayers were said over his tomb," was one of the last passages I cited from Wiesel's writing. I found the use of negative construction in this quote to be quite upsetting since, although Elie loved his father, he had not seen Elie in his final moments and Elie had not even prayed for him when he passed away. It made his story feel more sorrowful and sad. My final quote from his work is, "I might have found something like: Free at last!" The latter two were taken from accounts of Elie Wiesel's father's death. The first-person narration technique added to the emotional nature of the situation as a relative had passed away. Therefore, you should have been sorrowful or maybe angry at the SS officers. The first quotation was written using the "Negative Construction" style, while the second quote was written using the "First Person Narrative" technique, as it was written from the perspective of the author, Elie Wiesel.
Alliteration, negative construction, first-person narration, and other literary devices were used to make the Holocaust more horrifically real to me. They also showed me how ruthless the Nazis were and how they made the Jews' lives a living hell. "That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget." This quote comes from Wiesel's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, which was given to him because he raised awareness of, and spoke out against, the war on terror. Through this book, he shared his experience and described what the Holocaust was like for him, his family, and many other Jews.
