Night

SURVIVOR MEMOIR
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
The novel Night presents us with a lucid, horrific, and eminently personal account
of the gruesome atrocities committed against the Jewish people by Adolf Hitlers Nazi
genocide regime during World War II. So heinous were the crimes of this holocaust
that by the novels close, our narrator, a young Jewish boy named Elie, scarcely
recognizes himself. After his liberation he witnesses himself in a mirror for the first time
in years, and then records these brutally honest words, From the depth of the mirror, a
corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left
me. (Wiesel 109). Elie had witnessed so much torturous death in his life that he felt
himself a living dead man, a walking corpse who never sufficiently answered the
question, Why God, why?
This powerful and striking holocaust survivor account came to us through the
eyes of Elie Wiesel. Yet Elies experience is only one small piece of a much larger
picture of the fabric of the human experience of suffering, and therefore many other
experiences lie untold, left in open mass graves and lost forever. You are to tell one of
them.
Essay Instructions
You are to assume the role of one of Elies five other family members and write a
full 2-page (do not exceed 2 pages) fictional autobiography. Your account should focus
on two specific aspects of this experience: a simple telling of events that happened to
you, and more important, your view of God during your imagined experiences. Your
narrative should be creatively titled, typed in MLA format, Times New Roman/12-point
font, double-spaced, and written in 1st person.
Grading Scale
Technical
Grammar
MLA format
Spelling and sentence structure
Word Choice

10 points

Content
20 points
Creativity
Authenticity Does the account feel real? Is there sensory detail?
Theology is the issue of Gods goodness
despite the reality of evil and personal
experience addressed in a thoughtful way?