Elie Wiesel’s Night and Corrie Ten Booms The Hiding Place Essay

Elie Wiesels Night and Corrie Ten Booms The Hiding PlaceMany outsiders strive but fail to truly comprehend the haunting incident of World War IIs Holocaust. N bingle but survivors and witnesses succeed to sense and live the timeless twinge of the lawsuit which repossesses the core of human psyche. Elie Wiesel and Corrie Ten Boom are two of these survivors who, through their personal accounts, allow the reader to glimpse empathy within the soul and the heart. Elie Wiesel (1928- ), a journalist and Professor of Humanities at Boston University, is an author of 21 books. The first of his collection, entitled Night, is a terrifying account of Wiesels boyhood experience as a WWII Jewish prisoner of Hitlers dominant and secretive Nazi party. At age 16 he was taken from his home in Sighet, Romania and became one of millions of Jews sent to German concentration camps. At the Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Wiesel witnessed the death of his parents and sister. In 1945, the latter of the camps was overtaken by an American resistance group and the remaining prisoners freed, including the drastically changed man in Wiesel. The once innocent, God-fearing teenager had become a lonely, scarred, doubting individual. Corrie Ten Boom (1892-1983), a religious author and inspirational evangelist, traveled and administer Christianity throughout sixty-one countries, even into her eighties. Her autobiography, The Hiding Place, is an account of her inner strength found through God in the midst of the physical and emotional tumult of German concentration camps. During World War II, the Ten Boom family took action against the Nazi movement and began an underground hiding system, saving over 700 Jewish lives. (Contemporary Authors, 470) They were observed and sent from their Haarlem, Holland home to Scheveningen, a Nazi prison. Ten Boom, in her 50s, was placed on trial for leading the underground system and sent to a German work camp. There she witnessed her father and sisters death as we ll as the birth of her inner strength and hope for the future. Upon publish from Ravensbruck, Ten Boom began caring for victims of the war and Holocaust and used her powerful speaking ability to share the trials and triumphs of her life. Together, these two powerful authors relive the horror and pain of the Holocaust to educate the unaware world. They teach of the past, warn of the future, an... ...n & Co., Inc., 1962) excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, ed. Carolyn Riley (Detroit Gale query Inc., 1975), p. 526. Alvarez, A. The Literature of the Holocaust (Random House, 1968) excerpted and reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 3, ed. Carolyn Riley (Detroit Gale Research Inc., 1975), p. 527. Appendix II. Popular World Fiction. Vol. 3. Washington, D.C. Beacham Publishing, 1987.II-35. Christians Who Helped Us To Get Started (Praise Outreach). May. 1996. http//www.wolsi.com/kitb/influ.html. (5 Dec. 1996). Contemporary Authors. Vol. 111, ed . Hal May. Detroit Gale Research Inc., 1984. p. 470. Douglas, Robert E., Jr. Elie Wiesels Relationship with God. 3 Aug. 1995. http//www.stsci.edu/rdouglas/publications/suff/suff.html. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Vol. 3, ed. Israel Gutman. New York Macmillan, 1990. p. 1281. Sidel, Scott. All Rivers exam to the Sea A Review of the Memoirs of Elie Wiesel. 1995. http//www.netrail.net/sidel/reviews/wiesel.html. (5 Dec. 1996). Ten Boom, Corrie. The Hiding Place. United States Bantam Books, 1971. Wiesel, Elie. Night. United States Bantam Books, 1960.