Identity In Night By Elie Wiesel

An estimated 1/3 of all Jewish people who were alive were grotesquely tortured and murdered during the Holocaust. Those who were not murdered went through changes mentally, physically, and spiritually. This changed many people’s identities to where they seemed like a completely different person. Elie was one of the many people whose identity had changed throughout their time at the death camps. Physically, the Jews changed very drastically in the story. In Night, Elie says “The SS pushed us in 100 to a carriage, we were so thin.” (pg.92). This shows that they had changed so much because earlier in the story it says they fit 80 people to a carriage. From them being able to fit 100 people into one of these carriages, we see that these people were so thin they looked like corpses, and they probably felt

When he writes, “I went to look for him, but at the same moment this thought came into my mind, “Don’t let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself”” (pg.101) This is one of the first times you see that the way he has changed mentally because in the beginning of the story, the only thing he cared about was keeping up with his father. This shows that he really doesn’t care about anything besides own survival anymore. Later when his father dies he writes “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep … And, in the depths of my being in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might find something like – Free at last!” In this you see that he thought of his father like he was a burden and that he was happy he no longer had to look after him. Also he says that he could not weep over his father’s death when his father used to be the only thing that kept him going, and he never wanted to be separated from his