Strength In Night By Elie Wiesel

In a situation where your body is surviving on a thread, your stomach is inflated due to starvation and all the strength you had before is gone, you have to rely on mental and religious strength to carry you through your hardships. In Elie Wiesel’s “Night”, Elie talks about his personal experiences and hardships he faced during WWII and his life at Auschwitz as a young boy. Throughout the story Elie pushes through losing his mother and sister, lashings, seeing babies burned alive and the fear of death but also the hope for it in some situations. No amount of physical strength can help someone survive in the brutal place Auschwitz. Everywhere in the story Elie and other characters show that with mental and religious/spiritual strength, you can push through any hardship you have to face. Elie shows tremendous mental strength despite having an extreme lack of physical strength throughout the story. In the following quote, Elie and his family had just arrived at Birkenau and is immediately separated from his mother and sister. “Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father’s hand press against mine: we were alone” (29). Imagine being a young 15 year old boy barely fed, dehydrated and at a camp that was created for the purpose of killing thousands of people and immediately once you arrive losing your mother and sister. Elie shows extreme mental strength during this event, rather than trying to stop it from happening