Night Elie

How can one keep hope in the darkest of nights? Eliezer Wiesel found and lost hope throughout his life during the Holocaust in a traumatic and heartbreaking story. The chance that he would end up in Auschwitz was beyond his control, but he quickly learned how to make decisions while in camp: keep quiet, eat the soup (even if you don’t like it), and do everything in your power to stay with who you came with. Elie wanted to believe that he could control the events happening around him, but he ended up losing his childlike view of the world in an instant. Survival was the game, anything to stay alive was the play.

The whole novel is a story of the luck of the draw, chance and choice and the men and women dealing with absolute hell. Whether or not to flee Sighet was the first test of these themes in Elie Wiesel’s Night. Elie’s strong faith had led him under the wing of Moishe the Beadle, who ultimately became hopeless as he begged those around him to flee. Elie’s father chose to stay in Sighet despite the rumors coming from the war front. His father said that a man as old as he was too old to start a whole new life in a brand new place. When he wasn’t given a choice in the matter, chance (or luck as Elie says) at least kept him them together.

Their old maid, Maria, offered a place of refuge. Elie’s father said that only Elie and his older sisters would be able to go with Maria. Elie stated that there was no way he would separate from his family voluntarily. Elie and his father were strong together, even though the men around them would soon becoming more and more greedy for survival. Choice and chance appear to blur together in Night, and in Elie’s own opinion, all actions lead to the same fate under the conditions.

Upon entering t...

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...to sleep with girls. But still no trace of revenge.” (Wiesel, 115).

No revenge? Eliezer has survived the Holocaust, yet he feels defeated. His father has passed away, by chance, days before the end. I feel that feels no revenge at this point because he realized that it was all chance. Even the men in charge were operating by chance. The whole war was a product of choice and chance. I don’t believe that people had a say in what happened to them, despite their choices. I believe that Elie felt the same way, specifically towards the end of the novel. He had to become a completely different person just to survive, for physical and mental reasons. There was chaos. Control is a word that became obsolete, and Elie accepted it to be so: “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).