Elie Wiesel's Holocaust Memoir - 'Night'

In most literature, the main protagonist often endures circumstances that spark mental, social, and physical changes and may cause unfathomable and permanent transformations. This is especially prevalent in Night, a memoir written by Elie Wiesel that depicts the hidden truth of life during the Holocaust. Wiesel discusses his life as a young adult in concentration camps and his experience with anti-semitism. Throughout the memoir, Elie Wiesel undergoes several dramatic changes, which are his loss of faith, his changing relationship with his father, and his loss of humanity; all of these changes relate back to different themes in this work of literature. One way that Elie changes is his loss of faith in religion. Throughout the book, Eliezer

Prior to arriving at the concentration camp, Elie and his father have a slightly strained relationship due to his father’s commitment to the Jewish people in their town. However, their relationship to father to son is traditional in the sense of the biblical commandment that requires sons to honor their parents. After Wiesel and his father arrived at the camp, they try to care for and shield each other from hardship. As his father weakens, Elie and his father’s role changes; he becomes the protector and his father becomes the protected. During their time in the camps, Wiesel often feels shameful when he is angry at his father for not being able to avoid beatings even though they are not his father’s faught. As the conditions deteriorate more and more, Wiesel’s father becomes a burden to him, both physically and mentally, and Wiesel feels a kind of terrible relief when his father dies: “No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered . . . I might have found something [inside myself] like: Free at last” (Wiesel 112). This change can also be connected back to the theme that appalling situations can make a person lose sight of who they are, including their relationship with others. Through the horrors of the Holocaust, the basic family bond between Wiesel and his father, like the bond between so many other sons

The memoir looks at what it is like for an adolescent to live in a situation where he and those around him are treated as subhuman.When the German government and German society (Nazis) attempted to redefine the Jewish people as subhuman - as creatures who deserved to die - the victims themselves became cruel and callous to each other as they struggle to survive. For example, in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz Elie says nothing when the prisoners strike a woman, Madame Schachter, to keep her quiet; had they been in the village, neither Elie nor his father would have kept quiet. When he arrived at the concentration camp, he sees people struggling to survive. Prisoners and vicious toward each other and those with small powers abuse them. All of these horrific incidents cause Elie to completely lose his sense of humanity, a change that stays with him even past liberation: “I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Wiesel 115). This final and most profound change in Elie relates directly back to the theme that torture can cause victims and capacitors alike to lose their humanity. One of the most infamous legacies of the Holocaust is the sheer scale of one group of people’s inhumanity towards another group of