Examples Of Cruelty In The Book Night

Most of the story Night takes place in a concentration camp, so cruelty is going to be normal for the prisoners at the camp. The point of this essay is to give examples of how cruelty is a theme in the story Night.

In the novel Night written by Elie Wiesel, cruelty plays a huge part throughout the whole story. While the Jews and others were in the concentration camps people were being killed by the thousands every day. At the end of the story, they were told to evacuate the camp, and they just ran and ran, if someone stopped for a minute they were shot immediately. This is stated on page 85 when it says, “If one of us stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog.” The prisoners did not mind at all since “moving fast made us feel a little warmer.” The Nazis had no mercy on these people it was a life or death situation all the time, no matter the location, or time.

The Nazis did not care about how

“And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.” If the Nazis were ok with “hanging a child in front of thousands of onlookers”, who knew what they were capable of?

The first action that was done upon arrival, at the concentration camp, was the split men and women. The “Men to the left! Women to the right!”. Multiple people did not know that this was the “moment in time” where they would never see their mothers or sisters again. On page 29 it says “I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.” The first action they did was split families apart.

The information above proves that the Nazis were cruel in more than one way. They split families upon arrival, they killed children, and numerous innocent people. All these actions are cruel, therefore, it proves that the Nazis were cruel. The Nazis killed people without hesitation everyday, and then never thought about it