Elie Wiesel Night: Horrors Of The Holocaust

Elie Wiesel Night Name Institution Night is a book written by Elie Wiesel in 1960, few years after he is freed from the concentration camp among other few surviving Jews. He explains the experiences he had with his father at Buchenwald and Auschwitz Nazi German concentration camps. In his explanation, Elie displays his escalating disgust with humanity and the death of God. Even though he starts with a strong belief and faith in God as a result of the Jewish teachings he receives from his teacher, Moshe the Beadle, he soon loses his faith. If believes that if God was alive, He would not let the Jews suffer as they are. He witnesses the weak, old, young children, and women murdered ruthlessly in front of other Jews to scare them. Even though he is only a child when his family joins other Jews in the concentration camps, Elie survives as a result of numerous factors including fate and personal factors. To start with, fate is shown early in Elie’s experiences. Upon arrival at the concentration camp at Birkenau, which is after days and nights being crammed into a car without food, the group faces selection phase. This is to determine those who need to be killed for being weak and those who should be put to work. Elie and his father are lucky enough to pass the evaluation test. The survivors of this stage have to be taken to the prisoners’ barracks by passing across open-pit furnaces in which Jews’ babies are been burned (Wiesel, 2006). This is not an easy experience for the young Elie. However, he needs to act strong to avoid facing the same fate as the burned babies. It is by showing that he is not affected just like other men with him to the barracks that he survives the first ordeals. After arrival at the concentration camp, the Jews are treated rudely, stripped, disinfected, and saved. In addition, they are severely malnourished with many dying of hunger while others are eliminated for being too weak to work. Elie survives these encounters because of the arrangement of Jews to take solace in caring for one another. It is also through the love and protection of his father that he survives the severe malnourishment. His father decides to go without food and gives his share to Elie to ensure that he is strong to work the following day (Wiesel, 2006). This means that having a caring father at the concentration camp is one of the reasons Elie survives. Nevertheless, soon the parent-child relationship is inverted when it is determined that children including young teens like Elie have to take care of their parents. The situation is not different for Elie who has to ta...