Elie Weisel's Relationship with His Father in

Elie Weisel's Relationship with His Father in Night

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific and dehumanizing occurrences that the human race has ever endured. It evolved around cruelty, hatred, death, destruction and prejudice. Thousands of innocent lives were lost in Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jewish population. He killed thousands of Jews by way of gas chamber, crematorium, and starvation. The people who managed to survive in the concentration camps were those who valued not just their own life but others as well. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and author of the novel, Night, expressed his experiences very descriptively throughout his book. When Elie was just fifteen years old his family was shipped off to the concentration camps where they were separated from each other. He and his father manage to stay together, which was a small sense of comfort in a very uncomfortable situation. At one point in the book, Elie considers running for the electric fence to avoid the long agonizing death he thought was inevitable. However, Elie thinks of how he could not leave his father to be alone and he decides against it. In a sense, his father is his motivation to keep fighting for his life. Elie found purpose through his undying love and compassion for his father. When driven by emotions and given a purpose one can survive even in the worst of conditions.

Elie and his father both experience change throughout the course of the book. Elie mentions early on that his father is rather unsentimental and never displays emotion, even at home. It is not until Elie's father returns home from a meeting with news of the Germans planning to deport the Jews living in Sighet, that emotion was present in ...

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...time. A few days later Elie wakes up to find that his father had been taken to the crematory, but Elie does not cry, he had no tears left. All Elie could think of was food. Three months after his father's death, the American army reached Buchenwald and the prisoners were freed.

Elie fought his battle to survive through his undying love for his father. They were put through the toughest conditions. Elie managed to stay by his father's side when he needed him most. This gave Elie purpose for living, which drove him to keep fighting to stay alive. Elie by his father's side gave him reason to keep fighting. Without purpose or reason, Elie and his father would have never made it as far as they did. One must value those around him because together people are much stronger.

Works Cited:

Weisel, Elie. Night. 1960. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.