Choices In Night By Elie Wiesel

Although someone has a choice and can determine what they want, sometimes something else chooses for them. Choices can be in many things like what to eat, what to do, where to go, and more. However, sometimes people do not have a choice and are compelled to choose one idea. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and his family get sent to a camp. While there, they think they have choices, but the Nazis and other prisoners are pushing them along. Elie and everyone else in the camp were forced into certain Kommandos, had the choice of death or work, and had to choose if they would fast. With these choices and conditions, how do people survive? At the camps, there are Kommandos. These groups were to determine what work they would accomplish.

As Elie and his father made their way through the camp and the process, they discovered the camp’s difficulty. Once they concluded going through the camp process, someone says, ‘... Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium. Work or crematorium-the choice is yours’ (Wiesel 38-39). The Nazis forced everyone in the camp to work, to do things they wanted. The work they were doing was perilous, constantly working with little food. Elie had multiple jobs because of all the various Kommandos he was in at camp. Depending on the Kommando would determine the intensity of work someone had to do. Initially, Elie and his father had relatively simple work to accomplish. However, Elie was transferred to a different Kommando and forced to do arduous work. Many people within the camp would give up as they were working. They no longer had the strength to keep going; this was one leading cause of the deaths of the Jews. Since Elie was young, he had more energy than the others, which helped him survive through all the

The Nazis gave out limited rations—one bowl of soup and one slice of bread daily. This quantity of food did not suffice, yet some people decided they would fast, weakening them. Elie and his father did not fast. Elie had a few reasons; the memoir states, ‘I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence’ (Wiesel 69). Elie lost his faith while trapped in the camps; this led to him not fasting. Many of the Jews that still had faith in God fasted. As the Jews ate less and less food, they became weaker. Those that did not choose to fast kept about the same amount of energy they had before, but the ones that did fast lost their energy. When they lost their energy, they could not do as much, which led to death. Some died from starvation, while others died in a crematorium. Elie survived the fasting period because he decided against fasting. He kept his strength and got to live through