Life Lessons In Elie Wiesel's Night

Throughout the book, Night, there are numerous life lessons that can be taken from the novel and applied to one’s life. The story is filled with several examples of these morals. From the appreciation and importance of family, perseverance through the hardest times, and gratitude for the blessings in your life, we see the common themes of ideals that are good reminders of how we should be living our own life. The first, most clear thing to take away from this book, is the idea of family. All throughout the novel, we see different viewpoints of family and its importance. The most obvious of these viewpoints is the one of Elie and his father. They show a strong connection and sense of what family is. The two stick together through the

Elie, along with his father and the other prisoners, are put through unimaginable conditions. However, somehow, he is able to persevere and overcome the numerous obstacles thrown at him. For example, when Elie is caught wandering in the warehouse, he is severely beaten and publicly humiliated. Also, he watches countless souls perish in ungodly ways, but doesn’t lose hope, or at least doesn’t lose determination to survive. He speaks of watching the young boy, that everyone had grown fond of, be mercilessly hanged. Elie witnesses the child struggle to hold onto life, as the weight of his body was not enough to kill him instantly, like the other two adults who had been hanged. “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing…” (Wiesel 65). Elie speaks of the boy’s suffering, yet, Elie preserves through the trauma of the event, though he mentions how the soup tastes like corpses that night. But above all that, he has to observe his own father, the man he says he tries so hard to live for, die a slow, unbearably painful death. Even after the death of his father, Elie somehow survives his way through the unfathomable struggles, though he does say that he felt nothing really mattered after the loss of his dad. Amazingly, Elie Wiesel is able to endure these terrible tragedies and still he survives; still he

These prisoners are put through the absolute, most heinous tragedies. Nevertheless, those suffering most, the prisoners, still carry gratitude for the simplest things, such as extra bread or a second blanket. Elie speaks of his gold crown and how much value it has to him because it could potentially mean another meal, newer clothing, etc. Elie mentions that he is grateful that the dentist gets hanged because he gets to keep his crown, which is a gratitude that is hard to understand because Wiesel’s situation was so disastrous. “I felt no pity for him. In fact, I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me one day, to buy something, some bread or even time to live.” (Wiesel 52). Comparing one’s life to the lives of those living in concentration camps, is typically, drastically different. Most of us living today have more than one set of clothing, one thin blanket, and one to two meekly meals of watery soup and stale bread per day, things that plenty of people take for granted every day. I believe one of the best ways to memorialize those who were innocent victims of the holocaust and all the misfortunes that came with the holocaust, is to just be a little more grateful for all we have and to realize how much worse life could have been, like the lives of those unjustifiably