Essay Example about Night by Elie Wiesel

📌Category: Books, Night
📌Words: 927
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 25 March 2022

Night by Elie Wiesel is one of the most gut-wrenching biographies with vivid depictions of the Holocaust. We follow Eliezer, a teenager sent to the concentration camps in 1944. The grueling work, malnourishing food, and dehumanizing treatment took a ghastly mental toll on Weisel. Through these experiences, we can see the complicated teenager turn into a simple, other-worldly figure who thinks of himself as more dead than alive. As the story unfolds, we see Ellie go from caring for everything and everyone around him to a person who is solely focused on two things, food and staying with his father.

On several occasions, Wiesel marvels at the staggering amount that he has changed within the first few hours of arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the selection and integration process of the concentration camp, a gypsy (a Jewish guard) slapped his father across the face. He writes “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me … Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?”(page 39) This was the first of many occurances where Wiesel was floored over the change in his demeanor, and so fast it had happened. On several other occasions, he is simply stunned by the fact that he watches people be thrown into fire, gassed till they are no longer breathing, and watching people he loved be beaten with whatever the guards could lift. As if being face to face with the angel of death himself, Elie remembers the very time that has caused him to never be able to sleep. “A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes… children thrown into flames.” In this quote Elie makes sure to emphasize his age in the previous few pages, to make it even more staggering to the reader that a fifteen year old boy has to see things that have caused the idea of sleep to allude home for the rest of his life.

After Wieses gets acclimated to the camp, he finds himself caring for only 2 things, one of which is food. This was not exclusive to Wiesel, however. Anytime that an inmate would be given the opportunity to get an extra ration of soup or bread, they were considered fools to reject it. It was possibly the most valuable resource the hellground had to offer. During a series of attacks in Auschwitz, the prisoners were instructed to hide in the mess hall. While all huddled up, tired and hungry, Elie looks over, “Smack in the middle of the road, two cauldrons of hot soup with no one to guard them.. Hundreds of eyes were looking at them, shining with desire.. Fear was greater than hunger.”(page 59) As the temptation shone in their faces, eyes fixated on the liquid gold, a man opened the doors and began to squirm towards the rations. “We had never thought to admire him. Poor hero committing suicide for a ration or two more of soup”(page 60) While these men were staring at this man attempting to swallow tomorrow food, one thing was present inthese mens eyes. Jealousy. This quote and its descriptive language just goes to show the lengths that any of those men would have gone to to get a little more soup than usual. After running over 25 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) They received the message that they were set free. Most people when they find out they were set free will go back to their homes, jump up and down and celebrate. Not them. The first thing on their mind was to feed themselves. “Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves on the provisions. That is all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only bread.”

Being in a concentration camp, there is very little room for sacrifice. You must worry about yourself, and yourself only. While Elie found this to mostly be true, he still cared more about one thing more than anything else. His Father. His father was his rock, his support system. For as long as Elie’s father was alive, he forced himself to stay alive. While pondering this one day, he thinks, “As long as my father was alive, I wanted to live” In another moment with his thoughts, Elie begins to struggle with the idea of staying in ranks when running from the fight. The idea crosses his mind of falling out of the ranks and inevitably getting shot. While pondering this, he realizes “My fathers presence was the only thing that stopped me.. I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support.” The language in these moments is simpl;y desperate. The act of clinging to life is so alluding to Elie that he was willing to fall out of ranks and get trampled or shot. However, there is only one thing stopping him. Wiesel knows that if he were to say goodbye to the earth and his father, that his father would no longer have the strength to hold onto life. It would be Elies fault. Even though death would mean liberation of this thought, he pushed the thought of death aside, and just kept running.

Night tells the story of a young boy, named Elizer Wiesel, who has anything but a normal teenage life. He tells of the horrors of insufficient food, being stripped for intake, and endless hours slaving away is what he calls “the gates of hell”. He goes from being this relatively complex person, concerned with multiple things, to a simple minded figure who only cares about two things, food and his father. In the progression of his time at camp, we can see all other thoughts slip away from him. Put simply, if food or his dad was taken away from him, he would have one thing only. Death.

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