The powerful story of Ellie Wiesel, documented in the book night, lays bare the Holocaust, one of the worst atrocities ever committed. Over the course of WWII, more than 10 million people died of starvation, sickness, torture, and violence. The book documents this terrible event in striking detail, and is clear evidence of the willingness and ability for people to humiliate, torture, and kill others.
The Holocaust was planned out and set in motion by a few powerful men, and carried out by thousands more who willingly took to the abominable task of mass murder. Elie Wiesel, from the moment the he stepped in the concentration camp, was controlled by men whose goal was to kill him by any means possible. As he stated in the book, the Germans
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Even though they were under the exact same circumstances as their fellow prisoners, being given power corrupted them. These men were devoid of all sympathy, and would beat prisoners for the smallest provocation, treating them like slaves and never faltering in their cruelty. Elie Wiesel’s Kapo, Idek, was one such person. Elie describes one example of Idek’s brutality on page 50, when a livid Idek beat Elie for no reason. He writes,” He leapt on me, like a wild animal, hitting me in the chest, on the head, throwing me down and pulling me up again, his blows growing more and more violent, until I was covered in blood.” When the prisoners were performing monotonous forced labor, the Kapos would work prisoners until they could barely stand, yet didn’t give the prisoners a single second of reprieve. According to Elie, the children of the Kapos were even more cruel and sociopathic, most of which seemed to have a disgustingly avid interest in torture, and were loathed even more so than the Kapos themselves. The children would even beat their own fathers, and were seen as more abominable than the SS