Death Marches In Elie Wiesel's Night

Imagine being forced to run until your death or to run until you’re emaciated, running constantly without stopping in the freezing cold, this is what the prisoners of the Holocaust had to encounter. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, prisoners of the Holocaust including Elie, his father, and Zalman were forced to partake in a death march. They marched around the camp, around abandoned villages, as far as their feet would take them for 47 miles of torture. Chopin’s death march and Beethoven's 5th symphony relate to these few pages of the novel so much. Ideas that come from the songs and research about death marches really make everything come together and make me look at the novel in a different way. Not only did they have to endure 47 miles of pure torture, they had to go through it while watching their friends be extracted and shot for not being able to go on any longer.

It is distinguished in this way from simple prisoner transport via foot march. “They had orders to fire on anyone who could not go on.” This proves exactly how little sympathy the SS officers had for these dying innocent prisoners. This event was most likely in the novel to show just how hard it was for the prisoners and how inhumane the leaders were. The songs listed in the introduction are sounds of sadness and torture, often of someone who can not go on and can not undergo the pain anymore. They sound like someone preparing to give up and that’s precisely how pages 90-94 were