Elie Wiesel
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From the very beginning of his book, Night, we know that Elie Wiesel had a natural hunger for religious knowledge. At a very young age, he devoted his life to studying the Cabbala and Jewish mysticism. However, the questions he found himself faced with after the deportation of his family proved that his faith was not as deep as it perhaps should have been.
Within moments of arriving at Birkenau, young Elie went through his first of many selection processes. During this process, he was separated from his mother and his sisters. It was also during this process that he and the rest of his community witnessed the burning of a truckload of children, and they realized they were in a death camp. All around him, people began reciting the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, but Elie did not join them. As he listened to the words of the Kaddish ("May His Name be blessed and magnified"), he felt a hardening in his heart towards God. He did not understand why God's name should be blessed or magnified, if He was going to allow atrocities like the burning of children to occur. Later, Elie refers to that first night at the camp as "those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust...