Night Response

"What idea does the author develop regarding the nature or effect of threatening forces?"

As human beings, we are often faced with choices, challenges, and threats as we

grow and mature. Although how we act in these situations defines who we are, the

underlying importance of these issues is how we come to our final decision and how we

face the threats that lie before us. In Elie Wiesels's memoir Night, a huge groups of

people have their lives threatened and taken away as Primo Levi said "... at a yes, or a

no" and this shows just how predominant of an effect this threat had on the Jewish

people. Many characters in this memoir chose to address this very real threat in different

ways and because of this, the threat was allowed to flourish. The author, Elie Wiesel

wrote this memoir in order to show the great evil that lurks inside of some humans and

when that evil is unleashed, action must be taken to prevent it from turning cancerous and

taking more casualties. The various threats brought up in this memoir have shown that a

threatening force, no matter how small, has the ability to hurt us, turn us against each

other and most of all, change the very foundation of which we stand.

In taking away what one believes in, the ability to mold them into an object

becomes well within grasp. Throughout Night, we are told how under Nazi command, the

Jewish people were transformed from normal, hard working people into the "animals"

that they became in the camps such as Buna, Birkenau, and Auschwitz. In threatening

these people with their lives and the lives of their loved ones, the Jews were "persuaded"

to follow the Nazi demands, and had no will to stand up against them. During the Second

World War, the Nazis knew what there were doing and believed that in destroying the

rules that the Jews lived by, their will to rebel, their will to escape and most of all, their

will to live would be shattered by the Nazi rule. Upon arriving at the camps, the prisoners

were humiliated as they were stripped, shaved and deloused in a large public display.

Secondly, the Jews were tattooed partly for identification and most of all because it was

against the Jewish rule to self inflict any form if bodily harm. The purpose of this was to

take away many things that the Jews stood for and soon, some began to loose their faith

in god and what they had known to be right. In doing such things to their prisoners, the

Nazi's began to not only control them physically, but spiritually and emotionally as well.

With essentially nothing to live for and no reason to go on, many of the prisoners gave up

and those who didn't were forced to turn against each other as their only form of survival.

Throughout this memoir, the main character Eliezer and his father are very close

and do all that is in their power to help one another survive. At the times of selection, the

Nazis had taken the role of god and held each individuals life in their hands. One side

ment the crematorium and death, while the other was excruciating physical labour and

terrible living conditions. In hopes