“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” There he stands looking at himself in the mirror, unrecognisable after 1 year in Nazi concentration camps. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel horror takes on a whole new meaning, when a 15 year old Elie Wiesel is sent to Auschwitz, separated from his mother and sisters, and put through unimaginable horrors in the form of Nazi concentration camps. He is psychologically beaten and thrown down a horrible path. This book is an example of what happens when you lose your faith in god, lose all emotionality, and lose yourself.
By the end of the book “Night” Elie has slowly, but surely, lost his faith. Going from a student studying the jewish faith with hopes of being a rabbi, to an atheist is a pretty huge change. On page Elie asks “ Where is gods mercy? Where’s god? How can I believe, how can anybody believe in this god of mercy”. All of the atrocities he has witnessed and went through lead
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The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” He is looking at himself, a corpse from Auschwitz who let his father die without shedding a single tear, his whole family either dead or very closely escaping its grasp. This is not Elie, this is what Auschwitz has made of him, the product of torture, starvation, and psychological battering. He is scared of his own reflection. On page 112 shortly after the death of his father Elie reveals, “...deep inside me… I might have found something like: Free at last!...”. His own father dies and he feels free, freed of his burden. Being in Auschwitz was like being in a trance, while at the camps he became something he wasn’t, and after being freed he has time to reflect on himself. As you can imagine Elie is horrified of what he sees, a dead, lifeless corpse staring at him.