This quote is the final sentence of the book. Elie was liberated from Auschwitz, but had become ill so he was in a hospital room. He looked at himself for the first time since he was in the camp. Throughout his life in the concentration camp he became frail, and had lost a significant amount of weight. He had narrowly escaped death countless times, one being when he wasn’t chosen during selection, and another being the trip he had to endure during liberation. His experience with those horrific things changed him as a young boy. He lost his innocence and lost his individuality in the camp. When he looked into the mirror, the boy staring back at him was a stranger. He looked like a ghost, weak, and had no emotion. He noticed how the camp took …show more content…
The corpse also represents what Elie was stripped of, what parts of him died. He lost his family, faith, clothes, personal belongings, anything that made him a human. The death of Elie's father sent him into a depressive spiral. Elie’s strength came from his father and how he went through this trauma with him. With the death of his father, he lost himself. Losing his father was like losing a part of his heart, and that feeling never left. The last line in the quote is “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (115). Elie realized that he will never be able to return back to normal life. His faith in humanity would forever be tainted from the Holocaust. His experience in Auschwitz was perfectly summed up by this quote. I relate to this quote deeply. I have always struggled with my body and my self image. When I was younger, I was a lot chubbier than I am now. I would look into the mirror and hate the girl that was staring back at me. I would notice my imperfections, and instead of loving my body, I hated it. During quarantine, I came to the realization of what my mind was telling me about my body. I started to learn how to love my body, how to find the perfections instead of the