The Book Night by Elie Wiesel and Maus by Vladek Spiegelman - Essay Example

Nazi Holocaust The books Night by Eli Wiesel and Maus by Vladek Spiegelman, both try to give a vivid recount of the series of events that defined the Holocaust as it gets known today. These books bring to the fore the occurrences that shaped the Holocaust that occurred during World War II against people of Jewish descent. They are considered to be a representation of the happenings of the day because they get based on accurate and graphic recounts made by survivors of the horror that was the Holocaust. The book Night recalls the occurrences in the town of Sighet, Transylvania in Northern Romania. At the very beginning, we get introduced to the twelve year old Eli back in 1941. The historic expulsion of all Jew from Sighet gets vividly explained in the book. The Hungarian police rounded up all foreign Jews and bundled them up into waiting vehicles in full public glare. Rumor mills purported that these Jews got taken to Galcia where they became happy and got formally employed. These reports later got challenged by an escapee, Moshe the Beadle, who told of the Gestapo and how the Jews got killed each day. He explained that the Jews got led to a forest where they got forced to dig trenches before they got shot and buried. Babies, he explained, got tossed in the air and used for target practice. Moshe had escapes after getting shot on the leg and mistaken to be dead. The Jews ignored Moshe’s warning with some saying that he was mentally unstable (Wiesel 21). As soon as the Fascist took over control of the government, Nazi soldiers took to the streets of Sighet where they rounded up all Jews including Eli and his family. Elis family got put in a cattle wagon after receiving a stern warning that anyone who dared to escape would be killed. They got transported to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, men and women got separated. Eli and his father got whisked away separately, while Hilda, Elis mother and Tzipora got led straight to the gas chamber. Eli tried to remain vigilant the rest of the night in the concentration camp never losing sight of his father. He feared that if they got separated, that would be the last he would ever see of him (Wiesel 22). On their first night at Auschwitz, Eli and his father got put in line ready to be thrown into the fire furnace. They both watched trucks loading up children that were to be delivered into the fire (Wiesel 19). Elis father chanted the prayer for the dead, commonly known in Jewish circles as Kaddish. He made the prayer for them too in anticipation of the inevitable. They survived the night and got ordered back to their barracks. Sometimes the whole camp got forced to watch hangings of children. Eli graphically explains this when he says the child’s eyes were still clear, and his tongue was still pink (Wiesel 23). Eli and his father got moved to Auschwitz II form Birkenau in 1945. This was a work camp with reduced cases of violence. Eli explains that they were in constant search of food, saying that they were worse than corpses. After American and soviet bombing of the concentration camps, 60,000 Jews including Eli and his father got moved back to Germany in what gets commonly referred to as the death march. They got bundled up in trains to Auschwitz where many of them lost their lives due to congestion. They literally lay on top of others, occasionally throwing out dead bodies each morning. This train journey marked their symbolic journey to freedom as the Soviets liberated Auschwitz (Wiesel 65). Maus, on the other hand, gets divided between the present interviewing sessions where Spiegelman interviews his father and the past, where Vladek recounts his experiences between the mid 1930s and 1945, when the Holocaust ended. The book recount details of the marriage union between Vladek and his wife, Anja. Vladek got captured as a war prisoner due to escalating racist and political tensions. He got shocked to find out that Sosnowiec got placed under German siege when he got released. Vladek got released on the Polish Protectorate side of the border. He miraculously crossed the border and got reunited with his family (Spiegelman 72). After the Nazi invasion, the Jews got taken to Srodula where they were would frequently go to Sosnowiec for work. Vlodek’s family got split up, and Richieu got sent to Zawiercie while other Jews got moved to Auschwitz. Vlodek and Anja survived longer in Srodula by hiding in bunkers. Vlodek’s cunning nature gets revealed. He managed to convince the authorities that he was Polish for a long time. In a bid to escape from German hands, they made arrangements get smuggled into Hungary. This later proved to be a set up as they got apprehended by the Gestapo and taken to Auschwitz where they got separated (Spiegelman 92). Vladek vividly explains the hardships they went through in the concentration camps in Auschwitz. Human abuse was the trade mark of Nazi conquest. Vladek stated that they were victims of torture and physical abuse in the hands of the Germans. Lack of the food was a common occurrence and many Jews died in the camps due to the lack of nutrition. Vlodek explained that he was able to survive the whole time due to his resourcefulness. (Minsky 11). He tells of the ways he used to beat getting selected to get whisked away from the concentration camps and into the fire furnace and gas chambers. Vlodek explained in the book the throughout his involuntary stay at the camps in Auschwitz he was able to communicate to his wife (Spiegelman 53). The Germans got forced back due to increased attacks from the Soviet and American forces. They gathered all the Jews in the camps and had them march to Gross Rosen and Dachau, where hardship levels explained by Vladek escalated. With the defeat of the Nazi forces by the Allies, the horror of the Holocaust ended and those that survived the unimaginable conditions in the camp got rescued and freed. Vladek and Anja finally got reunited (Minsky 14) Night and Maus all employ crucial explanatory skills. They incorporate imagery and a vast deal of description in their style of writing. The graphic nature of the Holocaust gets depicted, and the reader can picture the events in his mind based on the explanation given. Whereas the book Night is a self explanation of the experiences of Wiesel Eli as a young Jewish Holocaust survivor, Spiegelman tries to portray the horrors that his father went through as a young Jewish man. This makes Night an autobiography of the life of Eli during the Holocaust times and depicts the book Maus as a biography of the writer’s father. Works Cited Sender, Minsky Ruth. The Cage. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Print Spiegelman, Art. Maus. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Print Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Print Read More