Elie Wiesel's Journey

In the book ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, the reader reads about his journey in a concentration camp. Also, how being in the camp changed who he was as a person, and changed how he thought about lots of things. Not eating well enough and having to fight for survival can change any person drastically. This is witnessed through the duration of the book. He learns a lot about the world, and has to grow up way too fast, only being 15 years old. Elie Wiesel has to make a lot of difficult decisions that affect his life in lots of different ways.

In ‘Night’ some of the first choices he has to make are about his identity, and how he needs to be someone else in order to survive. Very early in the book, he finds out that he needs to appear strong enough to be kept

This is where they chose who would live and who would die. At the beginning of Elie’s journey, he mostly went through age and strength selections, but as he stayed longer the selections became more about who was in good enough health to be able to do the work the German Soldiers made them do. The first selection he gets through is actually based on gender, which he doesn’t have any choices to make for. He was a male, who was not a young child, so they sent him with the other males. In the book, it is never really allows the reader to know what happened to the women and children, but the story is in Elie’s point of view, and based on what he saw and came to know. Another selection he has to go through is based on age. He was a fifteen year old religious teenager who had to lie about his age so they would think him worthy of staying to work. He gets told even that he needs to be eighteen by another inmate. “‘Hey, kid, how old are you?’ The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice was weary and warm. ‘Fifteen.’ ‘No. You're eighteen.’ ‘But I'm not,’ I said. ‘I'm fifteen.’ ‘Fool. Listen to what I say.’”(Wiesel,2006). The third, and last