APARNA SUNNY Comparing and Contrasting Liesel’s and Elie’s Experience The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and Night by Elie Wiesel, are about two souls who endured a great amount of anguish and misfortune. A Jew and a German, two individuals whose stories should have been remarkably different, turn out to be unexpectedly alike. Liesel’s and Elie’s experiences both comprise of destruction, self doubt, and the obligation to stay alive. Despite the similar experiences they confronted, they survived in their own means. Liesel’s everyday routines were far more uneventful than Elie’s, in that she went to school with Rudy, came home, then read or spent time with with Max. She witnessed her brother’s unfortunate death at an extremely young age. “... they [Liesel and her brother] would soon be given over to foster parents. We now know, of course, that the boy didn’t make …show more content…
Elie expresses in Night, “And I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother forever” (Wiesel 27). While Death, from The Book Thief, explains a death that had, “...an intense spurt of coughing. Almost an inspired spurt. And soon after - nothing.” (Zusak 19). Liesel had to sit and watch her brother cough out his last breath. She lost her family and got put in a foster home and they ended up being bombed; she didn't get the chance to say goodbye to either of her families. Elie also watched his father die right before his eyes. In the story, Elie and Liesel both accomplished their responsibilities to stay alive. Liesel did it through,“...her three children, her grandchildren, her husband, and the long list of lives that merged with hers...” (Zusak 544). Elie’s mentality was that to sleep would mean to die so he abstained from his urge. If they had given in to everything going on around them and lost hope, the deaths of all their loved ones would have been