Ian Smith Ms Crowell English 11 5 April 2019 Elie’s Survival in Night In the Holocaust memoir Night, the author and main character, Elie Wiesel, describes the time he spent incarcerated in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In addition to telling the reader the facts of the events, Elie also describes the changes he went through as a result of his experiences. He gives a detailed account of emotional transformation that constitutes psychological damage: how he loses his faith in God (at least for a time), and how he is forced to choose between himself and his father. This damage undoubtedly causes a decrease in Elie’s quality of life after the camps. However, this very damage allows Elie to survive through an ordeal that killed millions before him, it keeps him fighting for months through starvation, and lashings and hard labor. If Elie had remained himself throughout his time in the camps, he almost certainly would have died. Simply being a physically strong or hardy human being was not enough to survive in a concentration camp. Night makes this clear through the story of Meir Katz, a gardener on the wagon headed for Buchenwald who Elie describes as “less undernourished”, and “stronger than most of [them]”(102). Meir Katz died on the way to Buchenwald, while many who were physically weaker than him lived on. Time and the loss of his son to the selection had removed his strength to fight, and the state of his body made no difference. If the strongest among them needed a source of mental strength to live on, then Elie certainly did. However, Elie did have possible sources of strength that were a part of his personality before his first experiences in the camps to the camps. For example, deeply held convictions can lend strength to a person in a time of dire need, and at the beginning of the book, Elie and his strong belief in God seem like they could be an example of this phenomenon. This is of course not what happens, because Elie loses his faith while he is incarcerated in Auschwitz. In fact, on the same day he arrives in Auschwitz, he begins to express his anger at God, asking himself, “Why should I sanctify His name”(33). The fact that Elie lost his faith so soon after his first traumatic experience suggests that his Belief in God was not all that strong in the first place, and that it only seemed strong in the relative peace of his life before the camps. The fact that Elie’s faith crumbles so easily means that it would not have had the power to push him through months of pain and suffering. Elie also loved his Father deeply before they were sent to Auschwitz, and love is another facet of a person that can evoke strength and determination that one didn’t know they had. It follows naturally that Elie’s love for his Father could have pushed him through his ordeal. However, After Elie’s father dies, Elie survives in Buchenwald (While advancing Soviets are placing stress on the Germans to expedite their slaughter) for almost three months, therefore, whatever caused Elie’s mental fortitude must have outlived his father. Elie changes in several ways soon after his arrival at Auschwitz. The manner which he discusses the most and clearly put forth as a theme is the way he loses his faith, or, his belief in the goodness of God. However, this change does not stop with a loss of faith, and Elie certainly does not stop believing that God exists. Instead he becomes (rightfully) angry at God for allowing the atrocities Elie sees around him. When Elie witnesses the servant of a camp official, known as a pipel, being hung for the crimes committed by his master. This was a young boy, so small, in fact, that when he they released him, the rope did not break his neck, resulting in a slow death from suffocation, which the rest of the prisoners are forced to watch. One of the prisoners exclaims in this moment, “For God’s sake, where is God?”, and Elie answers to himself “Where he is? This is where” (65). Elie has come to accept that his God is not a merciful one, and Elie calls himself “The accuser” and God “The accused” (68). Other prisoners feel that God had abandoned them, or that all of this was part of God’s plan. These thoughts did nothing to help them survive, but Elie, with his righteous anger, found strength, for at least the first part of his time in the camps. But later, the way Elie describes himself does not purport strength, but instead, hollowness, a lack of feeling, or caring about anything at all, or, as Elie puts it, “a void” (69). During one of the toughest parts of his time in the camps, the march from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz, Elie says he moved “like a sleepwalker” (87). By this time, Elie has stopped feeling (in an emotional, not tactile sense of the phrase), and that allows him to push through suffering that would probably be unbearable to someone dropped into this situation straight from their normal life. And after Elie’s father dies in Buchenwald, he shows, through a single line the ultimate end of his loss of feeling: “I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat”(113). Although this sentiment shows that Elie has effectively lost what makes him human, (his complex emotions and desires, that go beyond his animalistic instincts) those very same human traits are what allow people to give up in situations as tough as this. A fox, that wants only to eat will chew its own leg off to escape from a trap; in this way, its animalistic instincts give it absolute control over its body, with no thought of the future or whether or not their actions are worth the suffering. Elie now lives like this fox, caring only for his survival, and that allows him to survive alone for three months in the most terrifying place on earth at the time. Things like love, and faith did not sustain Elie through months in three different concentration camps. He wasn’t simply a strong bodied person who was always fit for physical labor. He first had anger, at a God who would not interfere in the suffering of his supposed creations. And finally he lost (temporarily) that which separates humanity from the beasts, the ability care about more than our survival. Before being sent to the camps, Elie lived as a normal teenager, but in order to survive that ordeal, he had to change completely, which suggests that most people in their current state do not have what it takes to survive a similar ordeal.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Translated by Marion Wiesel, 2006 ed., Hill and Wang, 200