Suffering In Elie Wiesel's Night

When enduring great suffering, people are not capable of distinguishing right from wrong. In Night, one sees that the victims of the Holocaust will do anything to survive. Elie Wiesel relives the horror when he and many more fell prey to the Nazis and when they did unforgivable things to live.
An example that shows that humans cannot distinguish right from wrong is when they were running in the winter so that the Russians would not find them. Everyone was very tired, and when they finally took a break, Elie dropped to the ground. Others piled on and the one on the bottom was Juliek. Elie was the only one who tried to move but he did not succeed. Just before his death, Juliek “play[ed] a fragment of a Beethoven concerto” (95). This showed Juliek’s innocence and soft heart. The others knew that there was somebody on the bottom, but were too fatigued to move and silently let Juliek die. They felt that they were right because they were just trying to in order for them to survive and recover from their suffering. However, they didn’t know or care that someone died because of their actions.

In addition, when the prisoners fought against each other for bread was yet another example of how people could not differentiate between right and wrong when undergoing great suffering.

During a break, a worker threw some bread on the wagon. There, “[d]ozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs” (100). Elie saw that when the bread had landed, there were people “trampling, tearing at, and mauling each other” (101). One piece landed in Elie’s wagon and a man named Mier killed his own father to get the piece. This shows the barbaric behavior elicited by the suffering the Jews had to endure. It painted the picture of the people in the cabin who were acting like animals to get a small piece of food. Their hardships made them forget their morals and ethics and try not to

die.
Yet another example is when Rabbi Eliahu’s son abandoned his father. He abandoned his father on purpose so that he wouldn’t have to take care of his father any longer. Rabbi Eliahu tried to find him but didn’t succeed. His son left him so that he could survive, and this proves that people can not distinguish between right from wrong when they are suffering. Elie even thought about abandoning his father towards the end, but tried hard to take care of his father. Elie was someone who, in the beginning could see what was wrong, eventually forsook his father to survive. He knew that he was wrong, but did it anyway because he needed to survive.
During the Holocaust, there was a struggle to survive. This meant that people had to do anything to live, even murder. They were suffering and it meant that they had to abandon their ethic, which blinded them from seeing what was right and what was wrong. In Night, we see the conditions the victims of the Holocaust had to live with and the actions they took to survive. They did anything and everything to get through their suffering.