Good And Evil In Elie Wiesel's Night

Not many people today could imagine the pain and suffering that millions of innocent Jews had gone through during the Holocaust. It’s something that people tend to not think about and bury it in the back of their minds. The brutal truth, though, is that these events did happen. Millions of innocent women and children were murdered, men and boys were starved, and it seemed like all hope was lost. As much as we resent it, we need to think about it sometimes, so that we do not make the same mistakes in the future. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Holocaust forces Eliezer to ask soul-searching questions about the nature of good and evil, and about whether God exists.

It seems sort of strange that Elie Wiesel would think about good while in such an

How could anyone enslave and murder millions of innocent people and not be driven by evil? Arguably, Hitler and the Holocaust was pure evil. When Elie is thrown into cattle cars, packed in with others like sardines in the dead of winter with no food or water, he thinks “We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead.” (p. 100). How much evil must a person be filled with to put someone through that, let alone thousands? To let people freeze to their deaths in unstable cattle cars? Many readers may be shocked by this quote because they could never imagine themselves doing something like that. Upon reaching another camp, Elie thinks “I had forgotten that people sleep in sheets.” (p. 78). The Jews had become so used to other’s evil that they forgot something nearly every person takes for granted. Sheets are something that a lot of the readers don’t ever worry about being on their beds. Arguably, this is the point in the book where Elie realizes the extent of the evil that he has been put through. He realizes that he had completely forgotten something he had done for the first fifteen or so years of his life. This is the true nature of