preview

Theme Of Survival In Night By Elie Wiesel

Decent Essays

“I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself,” - Elie Wiesel. The author of Night, Elie Wiesel, wrote this book to tell the story of what he experienced during the Holocaust. He writes how when he first walked through the gates of what he soon found out was a concentration camp, he was immediately separated from his mother and sisters, and moved to a separate line with his father. He and his father survived the best they could together, until his father could no longer go on and Elie was left to survive on his own with the rest of the prisoners. He survived the beatings, harsh weather, hunger, and overall the concentration camps. He lost his family through the process, but he made it. This makes it very clear that the theme, survival, is important in the book in order to show Elie’s strength and how he fought to stay alive during the duration of time he was held in concentration camps. First, the theme survival, is very easily shown in the text when Elie is hurt very badly by a Kapo. “I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip...I had not realized it, but I had fainted.” (Wiesel 57-58) Elie Wiesel had caught Idek, the Kapo in charge of his block, with a Polish girl, and Idek punished him for it. He called out his number in front of a large group of people, and ordered him to lay down on a crate. He then whipped Elie twenty-five times. The pain was so unbearable, that Elie had fainted during it, and a group of men came over

Get Access