The Theme Of Empathy In Elie Wiesel's Night

When people see an individual being bullied, how likely is it that they will interfere? What if the bully is intimidating or looks stronger? The answer is: it is very unlikely. Most people are probably scared of the bully retaliating against them or do not want to get involved in something that is none of their business. This mindset is not new, and it is because of this mindset that so many people suffered in the past and so many people suffer today. This theme of ignorance and lack of empathy is prominently observed in Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. Elie Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust and one of the few to write memoirs about his experience and the horrifying ordeal that so many innocent people went through. The Holocaust was a systematic

Around 11 million people were massacred via death squads, gas chambers and other inhumane methods. The book starts in Sighet in 1941, when Elie was 12 years old; and ends in 1945, when Elie is 16 years old and Buchenwald is liberated by the American army. It details what life was like before the deportation, gives a first-hand account of countless atrocities and allows one to witness the true thoughts of humans on the brink of death. Another thing Night draws attention to is how destructive inaction can be. When basic human rights are at risk, the consequences of silence are too great; it is necessary for people to stand up for others, as they should have done during the Holocaust and the Cambodian

In both scenarios, people were suffering and being dictated by a political group that disregarded human rights and targeted certain groups of people. In both scenarios, few people acted to support the victims. The people who should have done something, who claimed to be righteous people, failed to act when it was most needed. The Cambodian Genocide was only 30 years after the Holocaust. The world was still mourning, the Holocaust was still fresh in many people’s minds. “That is why … the Einsatz-gruppen carried out the Final Solution by turning their machine guns on more than a million Jews, men, women, and children, and throwing them into huge mass graves” (Wiesel viii). Does this not sound like the killing fields in Cambodia, where over a million were buried? If the United States had interfered, could they not have saved thousands, if not millions, of lives? Could they not have prevented a massacre that, if not stopped by Vietnam, would have one day rivaled the Holocaust. In both situations, staying quiet did not help anyone, it only made the situation