Night: A Memoir by Elie Wiesel (3rd post)

In this section, there are even more terrifying images. All these make me believe how the author, Weisel, and others of the Holocaust could survive these camps. It just seems so unreal. In this section, it is a lot about survival and him loosing his faith. One moment in the book that stood out to me was when during an Allied air raid on Buna, during which every prisoner is supposed to be confined to his or her block, two cauldrons of soup are left unattended. Wiesel and many other prisoners watch as a man risks his life to crawl to the soup. The man reaches the soup, and after a moment of hesitation lifts himself up to eat. As he stands over the soup, he is shot and falls lifeless to the ground. Aslo another is when two prisoners are suspected of being involved with the resistance and of a young boy who was the servant of a resistance member. Although the prisoners are all so jaded by suffering that they never cry, they all break into tears as they watch the child strangle on the end of the noose. One man wonders how God could be present in a world with such cruelty. At this point it seems that Wiesel comes to believe that a just God must not exist in a world where an innocent child can be hanged on the gallows. One quote that really stood out to me is when Wiesel questions his faith:
“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. ..For more than half an hour [the child in the noose] stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet glazed.Behind me, I heard the same man asking:“Where is God now?”And I heard a voice within me answer him:“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . . .”
The death of the innocent child symbolizes the death of Weisel’s own innocence. In the camp, he has become someone different from the child he was at the beginning of the Holocaust. He basically lost almost all his faith, and it seems as though he is beginning to lose his sense of morals and values as well. In a world in which survival is nearly impossible, survival has become Eliezer's dominant goal. Survival is one of the major themes in this book. It’s basically every man for himself. In this section, he even admits that he lives only to feed himself. When his father is beaten, Eliezer deosn‘t feel sorry for him. Instead, he becomes angry at his father for failing to learn, as Eliezer is learning, how to survive to terrible camp by looking out for himself.