Cruelty In Elie Wiesel's Night

When hard times come upon you, will you step up to help others in need or will you do anything you can to make sure that you survive? In night Elie is faced with many events and decisions that change him throughout the story. He learns how people including himself act different under the conditions of the Holocaust. These events show that during these hard times people are known to display forms of extreme cruelty or kindness. In Night many hard times come upon people which can lead people to show acts of cruelty in order for their own survival. Like when Rabbi’s son abandons him “in order to get rid of the burden” (67). He didn't care for him anymore and thought that he was only being held back from surviving, so he left his father to die. In times like the Holocaust many things that we take for granted become important like food and water. German officers Woolf throw food into the train with the Jewish people inside and watch them fight for it. As a result, an old man was trying to hide the piece of bread when his sons “shadow threw itself upon him” (74)

When Elie arrived at the concentration camp he was scared and didn’t know his way around yet. The French girl shows kindness when she comforts Elie, he “felt a cool hand wiping the blood from [his] forehead” (53) after he was beaten by Idek. One prisoner helped Elie and his father a great deal when he told them to say that they were ages “ eighteen and forty” (22). If it was not for him Elie and his father could have been killed since their actual ages could be considered too young or to old to work. In the movie The Pianist one of the German officers goes out of his way to help Szpilman by giving him food and his coat. The German officers are known to the Jews as the people that ruined their lives. So, it is not often that you would find one who would risk his own safety to help out a