Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, is about his harrowing experience as a young adult during the Holocaust. He is not alone during this sad and dangerous time however, as his dad, Shlomo, goes through the ordeal along with him. Prior to their deportation from Sighet, Elie and his dad do not have a relationship with Shlomo always dealing with work and the community, and Elie focusing on his religious studies. After arriving in Auschwitz, Elie leans on his father for his survival. As Elie and Shlomo move closer to death, the two stay alive because of one thing: their bond with each other. As Elie sees many ghastly things, people dying of starvation and exhaustion, his love for his dad is tested, and he begins to question both himself and his love for his dad, and whether or not he needs him. Before the Nazis turn their hometown of Sighet into a ghetto and send them to their demise, Elie and his father do not share a close bond. Elie is a deeply observant Jew who spends almost all of his time studying the Talmud and praying, while work and helping the community always keep his father busy. Elie says of his father, “He rarely displayed his feelings… and was more involved with the welfare of others than that with his own kin” (4), showing that Shlomo rarely tries to connect with his family, often valuing work over family. Even then, his father still cares deeply for his children. When the Wiesels prepare themselves to be transported, Elie sees his father cry for the first time ever, and Elie believes that his father could never cry, that it is impossible (19). Elie sees weakness in his father for the first time, but it would be far from the last. Once the Nazis separate the men and women when they arrive at the camp, Elie is determined to not lose his dad, the only link to survival that he knows. Divided from his mother and sisters, Elie and Shlomo start marching towards a pit of flames. Believing he is about to perish, Elie looks toward his weeping father. He says it is a shame Elie did not go with his mother, and Elie realizes that Shlomo does not want to see his only son go up in flames. Elie responds by saying, “I’ll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames” (33), but Shlomo has no response, and instead only weeps along with everyone else. Elie begins to see the weakness in his father at this moment, which he had never seen before. The camps also change Elie’s relationship with his father, and how Elie interacts and connects with him, making them both quiet and hardened. They try to spend all of their time together, but they do not know what to say. After they avoid the fire pit and continue walking, the Nazis put the new inmates into a barrack and an SS officer gives them a quick briefing. During the briefing, Shlomo has a colic attack and asks the officer where the bathroom is, and the officer slaps him across the face and onto the ground. Elie has no response, and he thinks to himself, “My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked… Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh” (39). Not even a day in the camp, and Elie is already fearful of standing up to defend his dad, no matter how badly he wanted to. The camp has already instilled the fear in him to not act upon his instincts, but he also feels remorse for not protecting his dad, and he still relies on him. Throughout their stay in the camps, Elie ensures that he stays by his father at all times, often asking if they can be put in the same work group. The other prisoners see this, and try to use it to their advantage. An inmate, the foreman of the work group, discovers that Elie has a gold crown, and thinking that he can use it to bribe a guard into giving him extra food or protection, he tries to take it from Elie (56). Elie refuses, but the inmate continues to demand the crown, so Elie gets him off his back by saying he needed his father's advice. Shlomo says Elie cannot give his crown to the prisoner, but Elie thinks that he will seek revenge on them, and he is right. The prisoner knows that Shlomo is Elie’s weak spot, so he begins forcing the other prisoners to move by marching in step, and Elie notices this, saying, “My father had never served in the military, and could not march in step… That presented Franek with the opportunity to torment him and, on a daily basis, to thrash him savagely” (55). Eventually, Elie gives in and gifts his crown to the prisoner. Situations like these cause Wiesel’s dependence on his father to become a hindrance. If he did not need his father so much, he could have kept the crown and used it to get extra rations or something else precious. Moments like these cause Elie much confusion and worries, leading him to ponder more sinister thoughts, leading to further collapse of his body and mind. Toward the end of the story, Elie begins having more of these terrible thoughts of leaving his father behind in order to keep living. Along with this, he also sees other fathers and sons drift apart as they struggle to survive. When the Nazis force the prisoners to run to the next camp in freezing weather, Elie sees a son leave his father behind (85), and the father searching for his son who gave up on him after being together for three years (91). On the train transporting them deep into Germany, Elie sees a son kill his own father over a piece of bread that had been tossed into the train (101). Finally, he sees a man who was considered to be one of the strongest men in the entire group give up on life because he had lost his son and did not want to live on without him (102). All of these incidents have a profound effect on Elie, as they all question his own relationship with his father, and cause him to have this thought: “If only I didn’t find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival” (106). After having this thought, Elie instantly regrets it, but he would have never had this notion prior to the camps. That is how the camps have changed his mind and his attitude toward his father as well as other people, turning him into a shell of his former self. The experience of the concentration camps, and witnessing hundreds of people die, causes Elie to turn into a completely different person. He relies on his father for survival throughout the story, but towards the end, he gives up on him, as a lot of other sons had already done. Once the Nazi’s take Shlomo away to the crematorium, Elie does not shed a tear, showing how his mind and soul were altered, but that he still loved his father deeply.
Work Cited Wiesel, Elie. Night: a Memoir. Hill and Wang, 2017.