Dialectical Journal For Night By Elie Wiesel

The first piece of advice about how to survive, given to Wiesel, was from a young Pole, a prisoner in charge of one of the prison blocks. After Eliezer, his father, and the rest of the selected prisoners, made the short march from Birkenau to Auschwitz. Upon arrival they were forced to shower. After the showers, they were left outside cold and wet, naked and never given the clothes they were promised. Guards came and told the prisoners they had to run, “The faster you run, the sooner you can go to bed” (page 38). When the prisoners stopped running, they had arrived in front of a block, where a smiling polish prisoner greeted them. The Pole treated the prisoners with great respect and humanity. Rather than barking orders, he motivated everyone to have faith and help one another to survive.

The journey to Buchenwald fatally weakened Eliezer’s father, Wiesel describes his father as seeming at last to have “given in to death”. Eliezer’s father is ill with dysentery, doctors will not treat him, and the prisoners whose beds surround Eliezer’s father’s bed steal his food and beat him. All of this causes Eliezer stress, he is guilty about his father and doesn’t know whether to help him, or leave him and focus on his own survival. The head block reminded Wiesel that he was at a concentration camp and that in order to survive, he had to think of only himself and leave his father behind. On the morning of January 29th, 1945, Eliezer discovers that his father in not in his bed. He realizes that his father was taken to the crematory. Eliezer felt “free at last!”. The philosophy of the head block is that to survive, you must concentrate on your own energy, focus on keeping yourself alive. If you are worried about helping others, the less you are helping yourself, the less they of a chance you will have for