Themes In Night By Elie Wiesel

Father and Son Relationships

The Holocaust was a genocide of jews, killing many innocent people with extreme force and prejudism, yet there were some people lucky enough to make it out of the war alive. Out of those people, some decided to start telling about their life as a Holocaust survivor so everyone would know what terrible things happened and to make to sure that nothing like that will happen again. Night is a memoir by Elie Wiesel which is a story about his life during the Holocaust and all of the terrible things he experiences, such as the death of his father, all while at Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps. The incidents and events that occur throughout the memoir help to convey a theme of how life at the concentration camps affect

The children were being taught to fend for themselves and to have no mercy. None of the incidents would had happened if they had been living a normal life. Eliezer talks about a 13 year old pipel, a child who displayed great cruelty and superiority to their elders, who “beat his father for not making his bed properly. As the old man quietly wept, the boy was yelling: “if you don’t stop crying instantly, I will no longer bring you bread’” (Wiesel 141). Not only does Elie never lay a hand on his father, he also brings him bread, coffee, and water right before his death. Elie did all that he could to take care of his father. On Eliezer's march of death, a 20 kilometer plus march through freezing weather with only break the entire time he says that “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me… To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing… My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me. He was running next to me, out of breath, out of strength, desperate. I had right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his sole support” (Wiesel 180). This is the one of the main differences between Eliezer and his father. They differentiate from the other fathers and sons. Elie and his father have a dependence upon one another that keeps them alive, while the other sons dependence upon survival is on

The plan for Hitler was to make Jews suffer and split their families apart, and that is exactly what happened. The Wiesel's were a prime example of maintaining a bond. Elie’s father may not be an old man, but according to the German guidelines, his age and physique renders him very close to the call for the crematorium. Even though Elie’s father ends up dying from sickness, he thinks his father has had his number written down and selected multiple times. At one point in the memoir, Elie’s father tries to give him a knife and spoon that he had acquired because he thought he had been selected because if Elie's father had been selected then he would have no need for the knife and spoon, so he gave the utensils to his Elie. Elie thinks of it as his inheritance, and the sad truth of it is that a knife and spoon was the closest to the best inheritance he could have gotten. When Eliezer thinks that he is going to lose his father in a massive crowd of prisoners, he “tightened my grip on my father’s hand. The old familiar fear: not to lose him” (Wiesel 210). This is unlike some sons who would not have cared had they been separated from their fathers, at the moment. Eliezer was extremely afraid of losing his father, or anyone in that matter. Even though his relationship with his father had been altered by the camp, he still