Threats In The Book Night By Elie Wiesel

Threat is defined as a declaration of inflicting punishment onto a being by physical means or by psychological means. Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night uses real life events to depict what it was like to be a prisoner of the Nazis during the holocaust. The novel shows the various threats faced by the prisoners and how the prisoners coped with the threats in different ways. Wiesel and his father were both held in the same camp and they were constantly being deprived of necessities, being watched by the Nazis, and treated very poorly by the Nazis. Wiesel portrays the emotional, psychological, and physical threats that all the prisoners faced and how each prisoner must embrace and overcome these threats so that they can simply survive in the Nazi …show more content…
Wiesel writes, “‘Bear your heads!’ yelled the head of the camp, suddenly. Ten thousand caps were simultaneously removed” (659). Wiesel shows how the Nazis pose a threat to the prisoners so the prisoners react by obeying all of the commands recited to them, he shows that the prisoners do what they are told without even thinking for a second. The prisoners are also threatened to be without food if they do not follow commands or perform tasks provided by the camp head or any of his officers. For example, during the hanging Wiesel says, “Two prisoners helped him in his task---for two plates of soup” (659). The fact that other prisoners performed this task shows the readers that the prisoners have been threatened psychologically and physically because two prisoners were willing to execute one of their own for a bowl of soup. These prisoners have been malnourished and deprived of food, which leaves them weak and leaving them with no other choice than to listen to the Nazis so that receiving that bowl of soup is the best thing that could possibly happen for those two …show more content…
The story showed how each of the prisoners was constantly threatened and deprived of necessities so that the Nazis could deceive them very easily and make them suffer. The actual hanging of the first prisoner was done by the SS men, guards that watch over the camps, and by two fellow prisoners, which shows the psychological toll the Nazis threats have on each of the individual prisoners. To prove to the prisoners that no one should act against the Nazis, they hung a child who attempted to steal weapons in front of the entire camp this left all the prisoners in fear for their lives. The threat posed by the Nazis was clear to Wiesel and instead of running like other prisoners, he embraced it by following all their commands and doing whatever he was ordered to do, but also by not acting out such as the child who stole the weapons from the Nazis and ultimately he safely