Elie’s feelings change about his father countless times. He loves his father but he doesn’t really want him around anymore. This theme is not only important to the book, but it is important to life. Family will forever be complex, and navigating it can be harder, but Wiesel showed it was possible by illustrating to readers that there will always be good and bad times, it shows the internal conflict about whether he wants his father around or not, and it illustrates the dehumanization that broke the connection between Elie and his father. Most everyone loves their family, or they at least have someone, but at times, people need a break from them.
The Holocaust was a genocide during World War II, in which Adolf Hitler and German Nazis systematically assassinated over six million innocent Jews. Prior to the Holocaust, the Jewish population was calculated as 9,508,340, and at the end of the Holocaust the numbers had drastically faltered to around 300,000 survivors… only 9% of the once flourishing Jewish population. Among these survivors was Eliezer Wiesel, author of the award-winning book Night. In Night, tragic events transform the Jewish people and cause them to behave immorally and cruelly. Though Elie never fully escapes his fate, he comes close.
After Elie was separated from his family, people around him were saying the prayer of the dead, for they thought they were going to die. This made Elie
Although survival was a key aspect in concentration camps, Elie gradually begins to live numbly, surviving only because instinct told him to. He no longer cared for the meaning of life, and his only thoughts were of bread, much like a stray dog hoping it would find morsels of food to live off of. However, he didn't start off this way. At the start, he lived for his father. Schlomo Wiesel was Elie's only reason to live, but prior to his father's death, he slowly began to free himself of caring.
Elie was one of the millions of people who had to go through that and deal with the post-traumatic stress. By the end of his story, his diction and tone expressed true emptiness and sorrow. This is displayed by Wiesel saying “I wanted to see myself hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself in the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me.
Elie wrote books about the holocaust so the world would know what happened in the camp. What Elie wrote about the Holocaust only expresses a small proportion of what really went on in the concentration camps, so Elie felt that it wasn’t enough to capture the whole image. Elie’s suffering in the concentration camps leads him to achieve greatness in his
Despite describing his father as cold, Elie and his father stick together through it all, to his father 's last breath. Even though their sufferings were horrible their relationship improved because before becoming prisoners, they did not spend much time together. Elie is mostly focusing on his religious studies and his father on community meetings. Once they go to the concentration camps their relationship improves and they live mostly for one another. When father and son are taken from their home, they experience harsh conditions in the camps.
They become closer because they both stopped believing in God. “I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so good” (Wiesel 69). This is showing that Elie realizes his closeness with his father.
Dementia and physical illness rendered him too weak to rely on, so rather than asking how Elie would live without his father, a new question was presented: How would his father live without Elie? Immediately after arriving to a liberation camp, the surviving prisoners were divided into various groups, prompting Elie to squeeze his father’s hand as if his life depended on it. Unfortunately, exposure to such unforgiving environments had introduced Elie’s father to the kind of seductive release mentioned previously. This was conveyed through an argument between the two where Elie refused to let his father sleep. Elie had known that if the latter slept, he would never wake up.
What better than to have the idea of living peacefully, together with your loved ones, after surviving the crisis as motivation? Elie Wiesel’s reaction when he believed his father to be dead demonstrates how significant relationships with loved ones can serve as your motivation to survive. “My father had huddled near me, draped in his blanket, shoulders laden with snow. And what if he were dead, as well? I called out to him.