Haylee Fredregill
Mrs. Kraus
College Literature
1 May 2023
The Horror of 1945 “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not hearsay, it is indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” Said by Elie Wiesel, the author of Night the Nobel Peace Prize winning novel. In the novel, Wiesel and his family are separated after arriving at Auschwitz, Wiesel and his father together and then his mother and younger sister together. The mother and younger sister ended up being killed and it was just Wiesel and his father left. Wiesel gave his story and described how he ultimately survived the Holocaust and undescribable antisemitism through
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The choice was to lie about the ages of Elie and his father. If they told the camp that they were younger they were less likely to go straight to the gas chambers for being old and weak or old enough to be forced to do extremely hard labor. Elie was only fourteen when he entered the camp and his father was fifty. They were told by an inmate to lie about their ages so they told the guards that they were eighteen and forty years old. The inmate, Elie, and his father says “”Fifteen.’ ‘No. You’re eighteen.’ ‘But I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m fifteen.’ ‘Fool. Listen to what I say.’ Then he asked my father, who answered; ‘I’m fifty.’ ‘No.’ The man now sounded angry. ‘Not fifty. You’re forty. Do you hear? Eighteen and forty’”(30). This choice was important because if Elie and his father didn’t lie about their ages, they would have been taken to the cremators and gas chambers and be faced with death …show more content…
This choice was difficult for Elie and his father because everyday they spent at the camp could be getting closer to death by the gas chambers. They wanted to stay alive but if they had stayed at the camp, they risked being killed in just the day left that they had before the Russians would come. Elie and his father have a conversation about what will be decided, “Well, father, what do we do?’ He was silent. ‘Let’s be evacuated with the others,’ I said. He didn’t answer. He was looking at my foot. ‘You think you’ll be able to walk?’ ‘Yes, I think so.’ ‘Let’s hope we won’t regret it, Eliezer’”(82). Ultimately their choice was to leave with some of the other prisoners and risked not being rescued by the Russians to try and expand their time of survival. The choice to leave with the others ended up being a wrong choice for Elie and his father as they were caught and brought to another camp by the Germans. Schlomo had then gotten ill and been beaten to death, his last words being his son’s
If they would have told them their actual ages, Elie would have been considered too young and his father too old to work. Also, when they see Stein and he asks them if they remembered him, they said yes. Stein also asks if his family is alive and they told him that they were, not knowing whether they actually were. This helped to keep Stein going and a motive to keep on trying to survive the camp: to be able to see and make sure that his family was okay one day. Elie and his father lied so that they would not get hurt and die at the first selection and told Stein that so that he would still have
Elie does not want to be separated from his father and be left alone. The Jewish people were first taken to a concentration camp called Auschwitz, and when they arrived, Elie and his father were separated from Elie’s mother and his sister, Tzipora. Later on, they found out that the women and children were burned in a crematorium. The book states, “The baton pointed to the left. I took half a step forward.
Elie is separated from his mother and his sisters, but he remains with his father. They lie about their ages so that they can live. If you are too young or too old you are of no use at Auschwitz. Later they arrive at Auschwitz and they lie again to Dr. Mengele and Elie says he is a farmer, not a student. After, they move on to the pit.
On another occasion, Elie and his father are offered a choice to stay behind in the infirmary or evacuate with the rest of the prisoners. Elie chooses to evacuate. Elie shares, “After the war, I learned the fate of those who had remained at the infirmary. They were, quite simply, liberated by the Russians, two days after the evacuation”(Weisel, 82). In this case, Elie had no idea which option was to be better, being evacuated, or staying in the camps.
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.
When Elie and his father are told this by the SS guard, they do not think they have a choice. They want to live. Elie is holding onto hope, and he thinks that they will be liberated soon, so along with the other prisoners, they decided to work. The Nazis just wanted to see the Jews suffer, so it did not matter whether the Jews were working hard jobs or being burned to death. Elie did not understand this at the time.
You’re eighteen.” “But I’m not,” I said. “I’m fifteen.” “Fool. Listen to what I say.”...
The SS officers bark at the prisoners to quicken their pace as they march through a harsh blizzard, and Eliezer can no longer bear the pain he feels. He desires to end his life by collapsing onto a pillow of snow, but he must keep persist and carry on for his father, as he recalls “The idea of idea of dying began to fascinate me… My father’s presence was the only thing that stopped me” (86). Eliezer had someone worth living for, and he claims his father was the reason he made it out of the concentration camps alive after the Jews were liberated. If it were not for his father, Eliezer may have taken his last breath.
Elie has the chance to stay in the infirmary with his father or leave with the rest and march to the next place. Finally, he decides that he and his father with evacuate with the rest. This shows that Elie could have made the choice to stay in the infirmary or leave with the evacuees. Elie had no clue what could have happened to him and his father if he were to stay. He finally chose to leave with his father, not many people would have had the option to stay and were taken by force to the next camp.
On pages 40 and 41 of chapter 2, Elie shares with us the questions the Nazi soldier asked him once he arrived at the concentration camp, which were "How old are you?" and "What's your occupation" to which Elie lied and responded anxiously with "Eighteen," and "Farmer." His lie gives us an insight into his thought process. Elie lied and proclaimed that he was 18 and a farmer, knowing he was just a student and 16 years old. This lie conveys to us that Elie’s number one goal was survival.
Every day, they searched and brought amidst a reason to survive and presented hope to live. Individuals find strength in numerous ways that allow them to persevere through terrors. In the novel Night written by Elie Wiesel, he shares his story of the Holocaust with the world. Elie is living for his father, the single-family member he has left.
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
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?
When in the hospital, Elie got told the SS guards were going to mine the camp or the hospital patients will be finished off. All he could think about was being separated from his father. “I had made up my mind to accompany my father wherever he went” (82). Elie suggested to leave, because it seemed like the safest one of the choices. Later in his life, after the liberation of the camps, Elie learned that the Russians freed the people in the Buna hospital.
Three prominent choiceless choices that he made to escape the Nazi death clutches throughout his imprisonment were lying about his age, his choice to not speak out against the Kapo beating his father, and finally his ultimate decision to leave his father near death. One of the first choiceless choices Elie made while he was at Auschwitz was lying about his age, and this choice likely saved him from being automatically killed by the brutal