Decisions In Night By Elie Wiesel

In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is forced to make many hard decisions, from deciding if he should trade his shoes to determining if he should give his dying father his food. During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and his father are separated from their family and have to survive each other and face the challenges of being prisoners at the concentration camps. Some decisions that Elie makes in Night benefited his survival and some did not, we’re going to analyze his choices and see how they either benefited or worsened his chances of survival and how they affected others.

Near the start of the story, a prisoner tells Elie and his father to lie about their age, Elie decides to listen to the prisoner and lies about his age. Because Elie makes this

When the Blockälteste tells Elie that there was nothing he could do for his father and that he should stop giving him extra food, Elie listens because he realizes that if he keeps giving his father extra food, he is just hurting himself. Wiesel writes, “‘Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father.’ ‘You cannot help him anymore.’ ‘And you are hurting yourself.’ ‘In fact, you should be getting his rations…’ I listened to him without interrupting. He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father...You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup” (Wiesel 110-111). Though this decision is better for Elie, he still feels guilt and regret from this decision, especially when he hears his father’s desperate cries for extra rations. Wiesel states that “It was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty. I ran to get some soup and brought it to my father. But he did not want it. All he wanted was water. ‘Don't drink water, eat the soup …’ ‘I'm burning up ... Why are you so mean to me, my son? ...Water’” (Wiesel 111). If Elie were to keep giving his father his food, his father most likely wouldn’t have gotten better anyway which means that Elie would’ve wasted his food and left with almost