Although someone has a choice and can determine what they want, sometimes something else chooses for them. Choices can be in many things like what to eat, what to do, where to go, and more. However, sometimes people do not have a choice and are compelled to choose one idea. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and his family get sent to a camp. While there, they think they have choices, but the Nazis and other prisoners are pushing them along. Elie and everyone else in the camp were forced into certain Kommandos, had the choice of death or work, and had to choose if they would fast. With these choices and conditions, how do people survive? At the camps, there are Kommandos. These groups were to determine what work they would accomplish. …show more content…
As Elie and his father made their way through the camp and the process, they discovered the camp’s difficulty. Once they concluded going through the camp process, someone says, ‘... Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium. Work or crematorium-the choice is yours’ (Wiesel 38-39). The Nazis forced everyone in the camp to work, to do things they wanted. The work they were doing was perilous, constantly working with little food. Elie had multiple jobs because of all the various Kommandos he was in at camp. Depending on the Kommando would determine the intensity of work someone had to do. Initially, Elie and his father had relatively simple work to accomplish. However, Elie was transferred to a different Kommando and forced to do arduous work. Many people within the camp would give up as they were working. They no longer had the strength to keep going; this was one leading cause of the deaths of the Jews. Since Elie was young, he had more energy than the others, which helped him survive through all the …show more content…
The Nazis gave out limited rations—one bowl of soup and one slice of bread daily. This quantity of food did not suffice, yet some people decided they would fast, weakening them. Elie and his father did not fast. Elie had a few reasons; the memoir states, ‘I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence’ (Wiesel 69). Elie lost his faith while trapped in the camps; this led to him not fasting. Many of the Jews that still had faith in God fasted. As the Jews ate less and less food, they became weaker. Those that did not choose to fast kept about the same amount of energy they had before, but the ones that did fast lost their energy. When they lost their energy, they could not do as much, which led to death. Some died from starvation, while others died in a crematorium. Elie survived the fasting period because he decided against fasting. He kept his strength and got to live through
The travel to Auschwitz was 2 days. It is estimated that fifteen of the twenty million casualties occurred in all the Nazis concentration camps. Some of the people that were fortunate enough to live were temporarily held as prisoners until liberation and or death. If people were fit to work, they were among the lucky ones, if not they were likely to be sent to the crematories or put in the gas chambers. Fortunate for Elie and his father with a bit of lying survival skills, they were sent to the side deemed fit and able to work until almost the end of their
He had lost his faith, and his father was the only thing that provided him the will to live. Once his father was gone, his life no longer had value or meant anything to himself or anyone else because in the camps no one could afford to care for others, at least not as much as they had to care for themselves, “I remained in Buchenwald until April 11. I shall not describe my life during that period. It no longer mattered to me anymore” (Wiesel 113). Elie was denied basic human rights.
The prisoners of the camp were sent on a “Death march” where they marched their way to their next destination. Elie and his father lasted the whole journey, the Officers gave them a break when they hit their point and many of the prisoners wanted to use their break to take a nap but little did they know, they would not wake back up from their long-awaited sleep. They would settle down in the snow and die from many different causes like hypothermia or dehydration and or starvation. Elie and his father wanted to nap so they laid down until they noticed all the dead bodies next to them in the snow. They were smart enough to use their strength to go to a nearby shed.
Concentration camps had crematoriums that would burn people until they turned into ashes. Those chosen to live were treated cruelly and forced to starve. When his family arrived at the concentration camp, he and his father were separated from his mother and sister. They were taken to be cremated. Elie and his father were sent to barracks to live.
After they arrive at Auschwitz, Elie and his father are greeted by an officer. The officer tells them, “‘Here you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney. To the crematorium. Work or crematorium–the choice is yours’” (39).
They had rough nights at the barracks because they were not built properly. They had very poor living conditions due to things that could have very easily been avoided. What was Elie's life like after the
Throughout the entirety of what we see in the novel Night we can observe the vastness of the struggle of life, death and decision. It is there in the camp that one decision, one action, one choice a person makes could dictate the outcome of their mortality for the future. How do you survive such a horrid period of agony? What choices can even you make to remain sane and alive? Eliezer, a young jewish boy, must make countless decisions in the course of his time at the concentration camp.
The memoir Night explains how Elie and his family are originally separated and sorted by sex, age, profession, and physical capability. After being separated from his sister and mother, with only his father by his side, he is forced to go through the grueling process of camp admission, even after learning the horrific fates suffered by his sister and mother. ”Who knows what may have become of them - but we had little concern for their fate. We were incapable of thinking of anything at all... A barrel of petrol at the entrance..
Elie and his father, however, realized how much they already fast in the camp, and decided not to fast. “In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year round,” Elie says (Wiesel 69). Not only did Elie decide to fast because of the lack of food already present in the camps, but also as a symbol of rebellion towards God. Elie scorns and says, “I no longer accepted God’s silence.”
In this book Elie speaks of his hardships and how he survived the concentration camps. Elie quickly changed into a sorrowful person, but despite that he was determined to stay alive no matter the cost. For instance, during the death
In the book Night, Elie Wiesel is forced to make many hard decisions, from deciding if he should trade his shoes to determining if he should give his dying father his food. During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and his father are separated from their family and have to survive each other and face the challenges of being prisoners at the concentration camps. Some decisions that Elie makes in Night benefited his survival and some did not, we’re going to analyze his choices and see how they either benefited or worsened his chances of survival and how they affected others. Near the start of the story, a prisoner tells Elie and his father to lie about their age, Elie decides to listen to the prisoner and lies about his age. Because Elie makes this
The debate was whether or not they should fast. If they fasted, it would be dangerous because it could mean a quicker death. The people in camp who still had faith fasted. Elie did not fast. He was following his father’s request and he no longer felt the need to fast.
In Night. People in concentration camps tried to protect each other but struggled very hard to do so. Sometimes, they barely had a chance to begin with. For example, Elie witnessed someone kill himself because they already committed all he had left to taking care of a family member and was stuck. “A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father?
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.
He seems to find any possible way to fight against. “But further, there was no longer any reason why I should fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him,” (Wiesel, 76). As the book progressed, Elie found every possible way to fight against God or his retired religion.