Thesis For Night By Elie Wiesel

Hannah Patterson

23 March 2023

Honors English 10

Period 3

Dead Inside and Out During the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler led Nazi Germany to kill approximately six million European Jews. Millions of Jews were tortured in harsh concentration camps for years as they fought for liberation. However, survival following this genocide was traumatic and difficult because most prisoners had lost most aspects of their lives. After Elie Wiesel’s liberation in Night, his life would be forever different because he has lost all of his family and all of his happiness. At the end of his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel's mirror reflection is that of a corpse, as the Holocaust has completely destroyed the person he once was. Throughout this mass genocide, Elie had lost

Elie walked in on the Kapos in charge of him, Idek, in bed with a girl, so Idek whipped him twenty-five times causing Elie to not even realize that he “had fainted. [He] felt [himself] come round as a bucket of cold water was thrown over [him]” (55). This displays how unfair the system was because Elie did not do anything wrong, but he still got assaulted and humiliated in front of a crowd. Idek had no mercy for Elie, even though he was a starving child. As the prisoners were forced to sprint over forty miles, Elie “was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. [He] was dragging [his] skeletal body which weighed so much” (81). Prisoners were forced to run death marches when a concentration camp was possibly going to be invaded, so they would have to run over forty miles with no resources and would have to trample over dead bodies. This proves how physically tooling and nearly impossible these runs were because there were large amounts of prisoners who dropped dead. Elie endured all of this pain to the point where his body was physically dying off. Elie barely obtained any food or water and he had to experience immense beatings and torture, resulting in his own body