Night is written as a memoir of Elie Wiesel’s time in the concentration camps of Europe during World War II. In this poignant portrayal this turbulent time period in the history of the world, Wiesel heartbreakingly testifies to the experience through the eyes of his relationship with his father.
The relationship of Elie and his father evolves throughout the book from one that is taken for granted to one of disappointing release at the end. It is a father-son relationship like none other that has been depicted in literature or cinema in any way before.
As the book begins Wiesel depicts his father as being a man who cared more about his work than his family. Wiesel obviously felt that his father devoted too much time to the happiness of others and not enough to him or his family. When Elie desires to study his religion with greater exploration, his father dismisses him as being too young. It is evidence that the two were not as close as they could have been in the time before the Holocaust.
Sometimes this is a result of taking relationships for granted. Elie’s father no doubt felt that he was acting in the best interest of his family by working hard at his store and caring about his standing in the community. In his mind he must have believed that his family would be there forever. As well Elie cared most about studying his faith and turned over much of his time to the synagogue and his mentor Moshe the Beadle. Instead of having his father as a guide, Elie finds a different mentor to assist him in his studies. This could have been a time for the two to grow closer. Instead it was never developed.
As the Wiesel family is rounded up and loaded into cattle cars, Elie begins to see his father as someone important that he does not want to lose. As they arrive at Birkenau and depart from the cattle cars, they are given the order “Women and children to the left. Men to the right.” Elie was at a borderline age. He could have gone with his mother and children, but instead he decides to stay with his father who otherwise would have been alone. This consequential decision ties the two together for the remainder of the book.
Over the course of this time in the concentration camps, Elie goes through rollercoasters of emotion regarding his father. At times Chlomo is his life line; the only reason Elie does not give up and die. At other times Elie feels that his father is a burden. He can’t march well or keep up with the others. Elie feels at times that his father is pulling him down, not out of lack of affection, but that the concentration camp is such a place it required him to concern himself with his own survival only.
At times his father physically saves Elie from death; in turn Elie saves his father several times from the fate of death. The last word that Elie hears from his father’s mouth is his name “Eliezer”.
This is a poignant to a relationship that no doubt did not end with his father’s death. Wiesel is haunted by this experience. It is with great bravery that he entails this account so that he bears witness to the horrors of the Holocaust with the hope that no other son will ever have to experience a situation with his father with this kind of magnitude. The story of a boy from Sighet who through the brutal experience of the Holocaust comes to value his father most of all.
In his memoir Night (1958, 1960) Elie Wiesel narrates his experience in the network of Auschwitz concentration camps. Wiesel details father-son relationships to show how natural, loving bonds deteriorate when individuals are faced with intolerable situations. For instance, Wiesel narrates an anecdote where a prisoner murders his father for a taste of bread, thus demonstrating the breakdown of humanity in the face of cruelty (101-102). Wiesel, who fears he will resort to this type of violence, clings to his father in an effort to maintain humanity. Wiesel and his father, Chlomo, endured the Auschwitz camps from late May, 1944 until mid-January, 1945. Ultimately, Wiesel’s father, suffering from dysentery, died before the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945.
The first primary example of father-son relationships occurs early in the novel, during the first days at Auschwitz. Wiesel’s father, seized with colic, asks for the restroom. The guard strikes the old man and Wiesel does not prevent the violence: “I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing” (39).
Later, Idek, a Kapo prone to violence, lashes out on Wiesel’s father and beats him with an iron bar: “I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself…That is what concentration camp life had made of me” (54).
In another moving scene, Rabbi Eliahou searches for his son, who left his father behind during the Death March. Wiesel recalls: “A terrible through loomed up in my mind: he had wanted to get rid of his father! He had felt that his father was growing weak, he had believed that the end was near and had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden…My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou’s son has done” (90-91).
Finally, in one of the most moving scenes of the memoir, Wiesel narrates the death of his father. Wiesel recounts his father’s last moments: “Then my father made a ratline noise and it was my name: ‘Eliezer…’ I did not move…His last word was my name. a summons, to which I did not respond…I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like – free at last” (111-112).
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