Theme Of Evil In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Essence of Evil
Ahead stood a boy, barely sixteen, with a seemingly normal life. A life filled with worrying about his latest test scores. His story is a sad one. A story full of punches from his father, and empty bottles from his mother. Each night he arrives on his door step, turning the knob staring at the knocker that seems to scream “run”. He knows tonight will be just like the others, filled with fear and evil. Elie Wiesel has a lot of similarities to this boy. They both are too young to be living through such terrible situations, and both are completely changed from the evil expressed by humans. In his memoir, Night, Wiesel uses significant details to show the evil in humans and how being exposed to this darkness can change a person’s …show more content…
The physical abuse and corruption of power within the leadership of the camp and ghettos changed his mindset entirely. The Jews’ first experience of physical abuse is when the Jews were forced to line up in the smoldering heat, “The Hungarian police used their rifle butts, their clubs to indiscriminately strike old men and women, children and cripples,” (Wiesel 16). This quote shows one of the first memories Wiesel has of the abuse and acts as a foreshadow to the rest of the novel. Sometimes the physical abuse was not that of a beating with a club, but was simply a gunshot to the head - ending life right then and there. Wiesel states, “Behind me, an old man fell to the ground. Nearby, an SS man replaced his revolver in its holster” (30). This is another one of Wiesel’s first memories. This memory etched itself into his mind as a first look at the pedestal these men (the SS officers) were put on. They could just kill a man in cold blood with no punishment, no remorse. This was not his last memory of this type of treatment. There were the hangings of a young boy and several men during his containment. The boy was caught a culprit in trying to sabotage the camp. After not giving up information he was hanged to intimidate the other inmates. He did not weigh enough to have an instantaneous death but instead “he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death” (65). The death of this boy caused change …show more content…
Wiesel includes many examples of the Jews beating or killing each other even if it was not the intended outcome. On the train ride to Auschwitz there was a lady, a sort of prophet among the Jews. Each night this lady, Mrs. Schächter, screamed of flames and a terrible fire. The people within the car grew mad from listening to her. They gave into the impulse of stopping her. They bound, gagged, and beat her into silence. Even though Mrs. Schächter was trying to warn the Jews they were pushed passed the point of sanity. This breaking point is what allows evil grasp ahold of them. While running from Auschwitz to a different camp Elie ended up running next to a man named Zalman. They used to work in the electrical material depot together. After running for quite some time Zalman started to complain of stomach cramps, he decided he could no longer continue on and lowered his pants and fell down. Wiesel states, “I don 't believe he was finished off by an SS, for nobody had noticed. He must have died, trampled under the feet of the thousands of men who followed us” (86). The men behind Zalman did not mean to kill him beneath their feet. Elie had to keep running, knowing that if he stopped he would face the same fate. He did contemplate whether to just give in or not, but he knew he could not just give in due to the fact of his father needs him for moral support. This