Essay Sample: Resilience in Night by Elie Wiesel

Survival is one of the hardest things one can possibly carry out in times of distress or anguish. But in the book Night, Elie Wiesel proved to prevail rather than perish. Spanning from the time of 1941 to 1945 the holocaust was a worldwide genocide of the jews carried out by the Nazis or the National Socialst German Workers’ Party. This fact directly correlates towards the book Night written by Elie Wiesel because the what were essentially death machines of the Nazis were the homes to thousands and even millions of jews in due time. In the book Night, survival determines life or death in the camps by testing perseverance, facing hardships, and loss of faith.

In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is put through concentration camps in which he has one thing in common with every other prisoner: the perseverance to survive. This common goal of survival is really put to the test when the prisoners have to persevere through multiple counts of overall abuse through beatings, hangings, and ration deficiency. This caused malnutrition throughout the camps followed by essentially what were soulless corpses that followed the beck and call of those in command. Even though this what was most prevalent throughout the camps there was still perseverance in the prisoners that led to hope in rebellion or resistance. Due to the drive of perseverance, “The prisoners of the Sonderkommando, however, organized an uprising that took place on October 7, 1944, and did destroy at least one of the gas chambers. All the participants of that uprising fell in battle” (“Auschwitz” 9). This quote portrays the prisoners organizing an event of uprising to destroy the gas chambers which killed thousands daily in order to rebel and try to make an overall statement of perseverance to those in command saying that they were still alive. Still as perseverance was a topic of survival in which caused for the rebellion and overall life or death of the prisoners hardships were what led to that drive for life.

The perseverance that Jews and prisoners of the camps alike showed was caused by the handfuls of hardships that each prisoner dealt with day by day. What is meant by this is the counts of hangings that were dealt day by day throughout the camps, the reduction of rations throughout the ranks of prisoners week by week, and the labor that intensified as time went on. The hardships the prisoners went through essentially went through a cycle that started out from the homes of the Jews in the holocaust. The Ghettos. The ghettos were walled in towns or cities that were controlled by the force of the Nazis whom of which would limit the rations each family got, and the amount of families or people a family would have to live with in each flat or home. Then the families had to go from the ghettos to the concentration in cramped cattle cars on trains. Then came the selection process which meant life or death in the struggle which was survival. After that came the life in camps which led to hardships in the form of beatings. The author writes, “I felt the sweat running down my back. ‘A-7713!’ I stepped forward. ‘A crate!’ he ordered. They brought a crate. ‘Lie down on it! On your belly!’ I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. ‘One!... Two!...’ he was counting. He took his time between lashes. Only the first really hurt” (Wiesel 57). This quote exemplifies the hardships which were life in concentration camps by showing the beating Elie Wiesel got whilst living in Auschwitz II, Birkenau. Even though hardships were the premise of life in concentration camps, the faith in which the prisoners had determined whether they would survive mentally from everything they faced or whether they would become thoughtless corpses carrying out tasks like the thousands that fell each day from the conditions.

Hardships within the camps were the driving force to the loss of faith in prisoners throughout all the death factories that were masked by the name of camps. Day. Hour. Minute. These were the variables of time in which were the mediums used to measure the amount of death that would occur within the camps. On many occasions the deaths would be casual without mourning but with indifference. Though there are instances where even the insensitivity of death around the prisoners could not be forsaken. The author connotes, “His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. Behind me, I heard the same man asking: 'For God's sake, where is God?' And from within me, I heard a voice answer: 'Where He is? This is where-hanging here from this gallows” (Wiesel 65). This quote conveys the thoughts of which couldn’t be forsaken by the prisoners, “Where” this singular word was the metaphorical line that divvied the faith of God in two. And though hardships were one of the three components to survival all three need to be present to carry out the actual act of survival in the end.

Faith, perseverance, and hardships. These were the main components to survival in Night and the Holocaust as a whole. Faith would determine whether you had the resolve to see through the torture of which was the Holocaust to the end. Perseverance would determine the will of which one would exhibit to be able to conjure the resolve for survival. Hardships would determine whether one would retain both the perseverance and the faith to keep persisting in the struggle of life during the Holocaust. And so in times of distress and anguish such as the holocaust there are three key components to survival; faith, perseverance, and hardships. If any of these three components are lost within oneself then thy might be lost to the void like those who’ve perished in the death machines, or in the case of Elie Wiesel they will overcome the seemingly impossible and survive the mass genocide masked by the name, “Holocaust”.