Violence In Elie Wiesel's Night

“Nobody paid attention to them.” In a place of torment for millions, there is no “we”. Times of misery typically bring grief for oneself and others and create a sense of unity. But the continuous agony inflicted by the Holocaust stripped the prisoners of their human compassion. Sympathy and empathy were replaced by states of apathy, and desensitization enveloped the camps. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night shows how desensitization leads to a state of indifference towards violence enacted upon others through the use of man vs. society conflict, situational irony, and imagery. The consistent nature of the conflicts between a prisoner and the twisted society around them created an indifference to the violence brought upon others. For instance, on

The other prisoners became so annoyed and frustrated with the woman that they “bound and gagged her.” When the screaming continued and the men hit and beat her, the “people shouted their approval: ‘Keep her quiet! Make that madwoman shut up. She’s not the only one here…’” (p. 26). This inhumanity towards an innocent mother and prisoner like themselves demonstrates how the violent surroundings caused the prisoners, not to bond and support each other, but to instead turn on each other and inflict this violence themselves. This scene also shows how the other prisoners stand by, not caring to stop the abuse because they had become used to their oppressors treating them this way. This shift in roles did not bother them, and often times the other prisoners would participate in harming their fellow prisoners. In another case once the prisoners arrived to the camp, Elie Wiesel surprised himself when this indifference prevented him from reacting when his “father had just been struck, in front of” him; he didn’t “even [blink]”, he just “watched and kept silent.” (p.59). This shows that his father had been in conflicts with the others

During the long march after the hasty evacuation, many prisoners collapsed or were killed, but the prisoners continued on unphased. Wiesel noticed his grim surroundings and the other prisoners behavior towards them, stating, “Beneath our feet there lay men, crushed, trampled underfoot, dying. Nobody paid attention to them.” (p.89). The repetition of similar adjectives to describe the scene shows how much death and violence was around them in the march. Wiesel’s observation of the other prisoners’ behavior towards the death around them shows their indifference to those dying during the march. His use of imagery shows that the prisoners exposure to death and violence during the march caused them to stop caring about the others underneath them. After the march, the prisoners boarded another train to another unknown destination. Many prisoners were extremely weak, and the train made stops along the way to dump the bodies of the dead and dying. In his memoir, Wiesel recalls the gruesome scene where “two ‘gravediggers’ grabbed” a deceased prisoner “by the head and feet and threw him from the wagon, like a sack of flour.” (p.99). Wiesel’s use of the dispassionate descriptor of “gravedigger” emphasizes both the death the prisoner’s were dealing with and the