Analytical Essay On Night By Elie Wiesel

In Eliezer Wiesel’s, “Night”, fifteen-year-old Elie writes a memoir of the horrific journey he endured as he was hauled to and from multiple Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He and his fellow inmates are beaten and deprived of their basic needs such as food and water. As evidenced by the prisoners’ cold-blooded and ferocious actions and words, when people are mentally and physically tortured, self- preservation and selfishness become part of survival. During the journey to a camp called Buchenwald, the need to eat and survive overrules fundamental human civility. After ten days of travel in the cattle cars, a German soldier throws a piece of bread into Eliezer's wagon. A son kills his father in a fight for the crumbs of bread. As his son was beating him his father pleaded with him and screamed, “Meir, my little Meir! Don’t you recognize me... You’re killing your father...” (Weisel, 101). The young boy did not stop for a second when he was beating his very own father because he was desperate

As Elie and other inmates rest in a shed after a harsh and brutally cold winter walk, Rabbi Eliahu, a man Elie knew from Buna, asks Elie if he knows where his son went. Elie tells the rabbi he does not know, but then realizes his son left him intentionally and that “He had felt his father growing weaker and, believing that the end was near, he had thought by his separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival” (Wiesel, 91). The torture prisoners endured in the concentration camps desensitize them. It is astonishing that a boy left his father to die because he was too much of a burden. In the camps it was every man for himself and self- preservation came over family loyalty and commitment. Many of these prisoners have internal battles between death and family but their need to survive overpowers them and they are blind to everything