The Importance Of Family In Night By Elie Wiesel

A traditional definition of a family is defined as a group made up of 2 or more people stitched together with love for one another that is usually taken for granted in modern times. Throughout Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night Wiesel tells his firsthand account of how he had to live for both himself and for his father the nightmare in the concentration camps . This proved to have both benefits and consequences. Seeing his father every day gave him a reason to keep going. Once Wiesel’s father dies, Elie Wiesel’s hopes of ever getting out of the camps declines drastically, and he develops tunnel vision that only sees food at the end. The Nazis rob Wiesel of the only thing he can possess in the camps, which is the longings to feel happy and to love …show more content…
These are called death marches because of the extreme fatality rate made during them. As proved in the book Night by Elie Wiesel himself, “A hundred of us had got into the wagon. A dozen of us got out- among them, my father and I” (98). Elie Wiesel is faced with a difficult decision regarding if he and his father should stay back at the camp when the camp is being evacuated. Both Elie Wiesel and his father are offered a spot at the hospital, if they gamble with the odds of the Nazis killing the patients in the infirmary. They decide the odds are too risky and decide to go on the march, but the father still has mixed feelings about the march as seen when he says, “Let’s hope that we shan’t regret it, Eliezer” (Wiesel 78). Yes, the decision to be part of the death march turns around to be the wrong choice. Wiesel realizes this after, but he accepts the reality, even though he knows his father might have survived the Holocaust if they just would of stayed in the hospital. Wiesel and his father leave with the others on the death march to Buchenwald. They have to withstand Mother Nature plus the SS, both hollowing in their ears. Elie Wiesel is tempted to giving up on life, to let everything go. In the end, he just can’t bring himself to let go, “My father’s presence was the only thing that had stopped me” (Wiesel 82). He knew that his father relies on him for hope and for help. Elie Wiesel gave up a gold tooth and food for him. He wasn’t about to let all that hard work go to waste. As young Elie Wiesel knows, “what would he do without me? I was his only support” (Wiesel 82). Elie Wiesel’s hope dies, but his body and support is planted right next to his father. The father turns out not to be as strong as him when he dies, plummeting Wiesel into an even deeper