Night By Elie Wiesel Analysis

Human nature is a very complex subject to explain. Its sophistication allows our species to exist in an

enhanced state of mental awareness not experienced by any other living organism (that we are aware of).

However, amid the beauty of our nature lies the darkness that we all have inside. Elie Wiesel is a holocaust

surviver who described a story of the macabre so terrifying, it is as if it was from the depths of Pandora’s Box. A

story of one of humans’ evil pleasures. Witnessing other men suffer.

Mr. Wiesel was on a train car moving to Buchenwald (a concentration camp in central Germany).

Stopping in a city, a worker threw a piece of bread into his train car. The starving men hurled themselves toward

a small crumb lying on the floor of the

car. Like animals, they ravaged each other for a measly crumb of bread.
A father was even beaten to death by his son for said slice.

Elie was only a sixteen year old boy, there was no

way he could fight off dozens of hungry men for a piece of bread, but how it seduced him.

Years later, he told of a Parisian noblewoman, who threw coins at the people of Aden and watched in

pleasure as the reality of human poverty reared its hideous face in the form of violent blows. Although he

begged the woman to cease her pleasure, she simply stated thus: “I like to give to charity”.

The lesson that Mr. Elie Wiesel wants us to regard is that human nature can be very cruel. The man in

the train station only wanted to entertain himself and watch others fight violently over a slice of bread. The

same goes with the rich Parisian. Never be cruel to those who have less than you, their needs are far greater than

yours. Sometimes they are even on the brink of death, and even humans are not unlike caged animals when

treated as such. They will act on instinct and not on reason, and will be harmed by your cruelty. In the story of

the train car, a young man killed his father for a slice of bread. Clearly, the man in the train station was cruel by

making his fellow man kill their father and allowing it to happen. This valuable lesson allows us to

contemplate
our own actions, and compensate for our cruelties. Hopefully making the human species, and likewise, human
nature, more enlightened.