Suffering in Night and Mornings in Jenin

Suffering in Night and Mornings in Jenin Human beings are very different and these differences can often lead to violence. From all over the globe there are people with cultural perspectives that do not agree and when these cultures clash, the ramifications can be very serious. If people were able to back down from conflict and realize the universality of human existence, then it is quite likely a good deal of the horrors that are experienced daily would become far fewer.

There are certain things which are universal, that can happen to any person at any time and in any place regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion, age, sexual orientation, or any other criteria which people use to categorize themselves. Emotions are one of the most powerful things in human existence and human suffering is eventually experienced by everyone.

In Elie Wiesel's bookNight and Susan Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin, characters from two different eras and from two very different parts of the world have to live and continue on despite their experiences with unimaginable suffering. Wiesel's book Night is an autobiographical account of how the teenaged Elie survived life as a Jewish person during the Holocaust. The atrocities committed by the Nazis during this period in world history are well documented.

Men, women, and children were kidnapped, imprisoned, forced into slave labor, tortured, and murdered in unheard of numbers. It is rightfully considered one of the worst periods in world history for the sheer amount of misery that was perpetrated against an undeserving population. Jews were scapegoated by the Nazis and blamed for everything wrong in Germany. In the story, Elie works and tries very hard to survive his imprisonment first in Auschwitz and then at the Buchenwald death camp.

During the period written about in the book, he and all the other Jews try to survive as they are beaten and shot at by Nazis. When Elie was sixteen, the camp was liberated and he was saved. However, it was too late to save his father who was beaten to death in Elie's presence. In the end, he lost his father, mother, and sister. He says, "I sense their presence. I always do -- and at this moment more than ever.

The presence of my parents, that of my little sister. The presence of my teachers, my friends, my companions…" (Wiesel 118). Throughout the entirety of the book, Elie suffers. Many Holocaust survivors struggled after they were liberated, unsure how to go on with daily life after being subjected to such horrible treatment. The greatest suffering Elie experiences is arguable the loss of his father, but it might also be the loss of his belief in God. He says, "I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh.

I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God's mercy? Where's God" (Wiesel 77). After witnessing and experiencing all that he has, young Elie can no longer believe in God because, he reasons, no all-powerful God would allow all of this. Susan Abulhawa's novel tells of a different kind of suffering. Her book is about the Palestinians and how they suffered after being removed from the land which would become Israel.

Mornings in Jenin is about how the Palestinians were made to suffer by the Israelis such as one instance where a death is caused unfairly. She writes, "How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors' toil, without moral consequence?" (Abulhawa 48).