Eliezer Weisel’s Changing Relationship With His Father

685 Words2 Pages

I remember reading the Anne Frank diary when I was in middle school, but it did not impact me as much as Eliezer Wiesel’s Night. Elie Wiesel, his father, his mother, and three sisters lived the horror of Nazi Germany. Due to the fact that the Nazis separated males and females, most of the book is based on what Elie and his father went through. The Wiesel family lived in the small town of Sighet, which belonged to Hungary. Elie’s relations with his father drastically change towards the end of the novel, but we cannot judge him because we did not experience the monstrosities him and his father endured.
In the beginning of the novel, Elie’s father Shlomo Wiesel is a respected Jewish community leader in Sighet. He was held in the highest esteem by the community and his advice and knowledge was frequently sought (Wiesel 22). Unfortunately, Shlomo Wiesel made the same mistake as other Jews, and decided to ignore the warnings about the Nazis. Before everything started, Elie even asked his father to sell everything and move to Palestine, but his father told him, “I am too old, my son, too old to start a new life. Too old to start from scratch in some distant land…”(Wiesel 27) . Soon after, the Nazis come into Sighet and formed two ghettos. While been in the smaller ghetto waiting to be moved, the Wiesel’s family former maid, Maria, offers to hide the family in her village, but once again Elie’s father declines the opportunity.
The Wiesel family arrived at the Birkenau concentration camp and was instantly separated. An SS commanded, “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (Wiesel 47) and that was the last time Elie saw his mother and sisters. An inmate approached Elie and his father and told them to lie about their age; Elie must make him...

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... death. He no longer thought of his father and mother, and when he dreamed, it was about an extra ration of soup or bread (Wiesel 131). On April 11, 1945 Buchenwald was liberated. Three days after, Elie became very ill and was transferred to a hospital where he spent two weeks between life and death (Wiesel 133). I do not blame Elie Wiesel for the changes in the relations with his father because in the end all he was doing was surviving. If Elie would have intervened in the various situations that occurred in the camps to his father or if he would have kept on giving his rations to his father, he might have died also, either from getting beat by an SS officer or from starvation. As inhumane as it might seem, it really was not because it was the only way to survive.

Works Cited

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Trans. Marion Wiesel. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006. Print

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