“I speak from experience that even in darkness, it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man” (Weisel). In his memoir, Night, Elie Weisel describes the atrocities of the Holocaust he lived through as a Jewish teenager in Auschwitz. As the prisoners were pushed beyond the imaginable, to the point where all that remained was the raw, human instinct to survive, people still fought against it and treated others with compassion and respect even as others around them were forced beyond the point of rational decisions to the point of pure cruelty. This exemplifies the idea that human beings truly are good at heart, as amidst the horrors of the concentration camps, the violent desperation of the prisoners and the brutal cruelty …show more content…
The SS does not care that these are human beings, real people with families and lives that are dead as a direct result of them. They have no compassion for the lives lost, the people they have murdered. At best they are apathetic, uncaring, but at worst, monstrous and barbaric, barely human. After being transported to Buna, a work camp, the prisoners are forced to labor through horrible conditions, starving and sick, to work in factories. The leader of Elie’s block, Idek, is known as one of the best Kapos to have, one of the kind ones, yet he too is riddled with cruelty. For no reason other than his foul mood, he “threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood” (53). The use of the word “crushing”, truly shows the violence in this act. Elie was being battered, crushed by this Kapo, simply for existing in his general vicinity. The willingness to beat another human being for your own pleasure is completely