Night Elie Wiesel Conflict Essay

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In 1944, Elie Wiesel was only 15 when his family was stripped of their natural rights and forcefully transported into the most well-known concentration camp, Auschwitz. Beginning in 1941 and officially ending in 1945, the Holocaust was a genocide of anti-semitism. In Night, Elie Wiesel shares his experience of facing extreme racism within the concentration camps by facing starvation, torture, and even death. The concentration camp ended up being survival of the fittest, only those who crave to survive survived. Though, in Night, two characters who portray conflicts with survival are Mrs. Schacter with the loss of her family and Elie stretched between picking his father or himself. First and foremost, Mrs. Schacter was conflicted when she was …show more content…

After arriving at Buchenwald, Elie’s father had grown extremely sick from dysentery, a disease which made him extremely thirsty but extremely dangerous to give water to. As he is battling his inner fear of becoming Rabbi Elahu’s son (who abandoned his own father), the Blockaltest tells Elie, “ ‘Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you can’t think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations…’ “ (110-111). The Blockaltest tells ELie that he should forget about trying to care for his sickly father more and to focus on surviving. Elie is conflicted because he wants to stay with the only family he knows he has left and didn’t want to abandon his father to prioritize himself like Rabbi Eliahu’s son. This shows the struggle between life and death because if Elie were to continue giving his rations to his father, he risked his own well-being. When his father got extremely sick, Elie had to choose between helping his father by sacrificing more of his rations or saving himself and keeping his

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