Self Preservation In Night By Elie Wiesel

On September 1, 1939 World War II began. Germany and the axis powers were trying to get Europe to be in Nazi control. With this came the wrath of Adolf Hitler. He believed the reason why Germany lost World War I and had a huge economic crisis was because of the Jewish population, the mentally ill, blacks, and gypsies. He believed the only way to cleanse the world and prevent that from happening again was to exterminate those people. Hitler’s inhumanity was in charge of a genocide that killed 11 million people. 6 million of which were Jews. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel tells his first-hand account of one of the most cruel time periods where self-preservation was one of the most important things the prisoners needed to survive. This later was named the Holocaust.

Although, the bystanders did nothing to help the helpless, in turn being almost as cruel. During the ten-day train ride to Buchenwald, the train stopped in a village. Curious of what the starving prisoner would do, “a workman took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon” (Wiesel 73). Soon several workmen were throwing pieces of bread into the wagon. When a piece was thrown into Elie’s wagon, a father got it. The father’s son saw this and attacked him. The little boy eventually killed his father for a tiny piece of bread. The starving little boy needed something to eat, even if it meant killing his own father. This shows that the prisoners would do anything for something to