During the horrors that Elie faced in the Holocaust, he had learned many lessons. He went through the most tragic event in history and managed to survive the mental and physical torment. The biggest lesson that Elie learned throughout this book was to never stay silent. When people stayed silent, when no one spoke up, it leads to horrible events such as the Holocaust. The silence was a key factor in how Elie survived, but that same silence was an aspect that drove him crazy. When he couldn’t speak up, when no one spoke up for him, or even the silence of God. When God was so silent during these times, Elie was slowly deteriorating, with nothing to hold on to.
Throughout this book, we see the theme of silence everywhere. “Even Moishe the Beadle had fallen silent.” (8) We see the first example of silence right at the beginning of the book. Moishe had come back from his horrible experience and was explaining to the people in town that they should escape before everything got worse. However, no one listened, and they all became prisoners in concentration camps. Moishe the Beadle felt that there was nothing worth talking about if no one was going to listen to him. At the beginning of the book, we can see how Elie is trying to illustrate that silence is only going to harm the people. His neighbors were warned, but no one wanted to listen and only silence fell again.
We can once again see the harm of staying quiet on page 54. “I had watched it all happening without moving. I kept silent.” This was when Elie’s father was attacked and beat up by an SS soldier. He stayed silent and could not find the courage to speak out about how wrong this was, he was so suppressed that at one point Elie thought it was his own father’s fault for getting beat. The dreadful effects of staying silent are once again shown in this example. He couldn’t find the fault in the soldier, but his father instead. His thoughts had all been changed because he couldn’t stand up for himself or his father. He stayed in the corner while his father was getting beat up and thought that it was his father that couldn’t stay out of the soldier’s way, therefore he got beat up.
Through these examples we can see how harmful being silent was, but how was this so helpful if being silent only brought his pain. He survived after the Holocaust because he learned the dangerous lesson of staying silent. He knew how harmful being silent was, so if there was something wrong he spoke about it in his life after this experience. In a speech he once gave, he talked about how so many people even in our current world were being suppressed and he spoke out about it. If not for this lesson of silence Elie, would’ve never been able to do this. Silence ties into the symbolism of Night. Why did Elie title his story “Night?” The connotation of Night is bad, it’s talking about the dark times that he went through. When thinking of Night we don’t think happy thoughts, it is most scary, dark, and cold. The night is filled with silence, which once again ties into the theme of silence and how it helped Elie.
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