In his famous auobiography, Night, Nobel Prize-winner Elie Wiesel tells the dramatic story of his internment in a concentration camp and the torture and loss he suffered there. It is a heartbreaking tale, even moreso because it is true. Wiesel lost first his religious instructor, then his mother and sister, then his friends, and finally his father. On top of all that, he lost his faith. But even in the midst of this hell, Wiesel survived. He withstood some of the most brutal, awful torment man or God could align against him. Others around him also survived. How? By finding hope in the midst of madness. Without hope there is no survival. Oh, certainly, some people reverted to sheer animal instinct and survived by clawing and killing and abandoning relatives. But Elie does not consider these people survivors. They did not withstand the mental strain. They cracked under pressure and lost their humanity. They lost their souls.
Food and water are merely the needs of the body. If a man is truly driven, he can go for long periods of time without them. Indeed, Wiesel and his fellow prisoners spent many long months in a death camp eating little more than a bowl of soup and a crust of bread every day. On this diet they performed manual labor each day and on one occasion ran more than forty miles without stopping (83). After running they rode in a train for ten days with nothing at all to eat and nothing to quench their thirst but the snow that was slowly freezing them to death (95). No, it is not food and water that are a man's greatest needs. Above all else, men need hope. They cannot live without it. Bread and butter may sustain the body, but hope sustains the soul. Without the soul, the body has nothing to animate it; it is but an empty shell.
The Jews in Night sought hope in a number of different ways. Some found it in defiance. For Wiesel, it was defiance particularly against an unjust God. For others, it was more against the Nazi oppressors. When Allied planes bomb Buna, Wiesel thought to himself, "to see the whole works go up in fire-- what revenge! We had heard so much talk about the defeats of German troops on various fronts, but we did not know how much to believe. This, today, was real" (57)! The prisoners went cheerfully to clear away the ruins (58). Some of the prisoners that Wiesel describes as being the kindest and most human are those whose defiance was the most overt. For example, the Dutchman-- whom everyone loved like a brother-- and his angel-faced servant-child were found guilty of sabotage and of illegally stockpiling arms (60-61). Others ran a resistance movement that eventually took over the camp. But on at least one occasion the defiance was more idealistic than actual. In a memorable scene, the head of the block orders four prisoners to wash the block floor only an hour before evacuation. He explains that it is "for the liberating army… so that they'll realize there were men living here and not pigs" (80).
Defiance wasn't the only way the imprisoned Jews found hope. One of the most significant methods was religion and prayer. As they initially approached the crematory some of the men begin to say the Kaddish-- the prayer for the dead-- for themselves. Even here, on the brink of death, Elie's father praised God (31). Akiba Drumer, a well-respected religious man, justified his suffering by saying that "God is testing us. He wants to find out whether we can dominate our base instincts and kill the Satan within us. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us relentlessly, it's a sign that he loves us all the more" (42). Drumer was strong and healthy until one day his faith failed. With his faith went his health. Wiesel writes, "Poor Akiba Drumer, if he could have gone on believing in God… he would not have been taken by the selection" (73). Prayer was an important part of life for all the believing Jews in the camps (64). Even Wiesel, who believed that God is either cruel or dead, occasionally found himself crying out to his creator.
A final source of hope was friends and family members. The "first human words" Wiesel heard in Auschwitz were from the head of the block. He advised the new prisoners to "let there be comradeship among you… Help each other. It is the only way to survive" (38). Throughout the book Elie, on the brink of despair, struggled onward solely for his father's sake. He writes, "My father's presence was the only thing that stopped me… I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support" (82). Other scenes also testify to the hope found in family members. Rabbi Eliahou searches desperately for his son among the dead (87). Stein, a relative of Elie's, says, "The only thing that keeps me alive… is that Reizel and the children are still alive. If it weren't for them, I couldn't keep going" (42).
Wiesel and his fellow prisoners deceived the Nazis to better their lot, but they also deceived each other and occasionally even themselves. They knew that a man cannot live without hope, so where there was no hope to be found, they created it. Rumors constantly circulated that the war was almost over or that the Russians would arrive soon (39). Few took these rumors seriously, but they repeated them anyway. Wiesel lied to Stein when he told him that his wife and child were alive, and Elie and his father lied to each other about Elie's mother and sister, pretending that they must still be alive (42-43). When Rabbi Eliahou asked about his son, Elie decided not to tell him that his son had intentionally abandoned him during the long run toward the next camp (87).
The one thing that Wiesel speaks against very strongly in the book is the dehumanization that many people allowed themselves to fall into. He tells disapprovingly of the boy of thirteen who beat his father because the latter had not made his bed properly (60). And when Rabbi Eliahou inquired about his son, Wiesel writes that "A terrible thought loomed 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, to free himself of the encumbrance which could lessen his own chances of survival" (87). On another occasion dozens of starving men fought to the death over a piece of bread. Among them were a father and a son. The father triumphantly clutched the piece of bread when suddenly his son leapt upon him and killed him (96). These father-son conflicts are particularly memorable for Wiesel because near the end of the book he struggles with similar feelings. He prays to a God in whom he no longer believes, "My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done" (87). In the final chapters, he struggles against the sin of dehumanization more even than he struggles for life itself. When his father despairs, he temporarily abandons him and has thoughts akin to those of the Rabbi's son. "I felt ashamed," he writes, "ashamed forever" (101). With his final gasps, Elie's father cries out to his son for water. A soldier hits him with the butt of his rifle to make him be quiet, shattering his skull. Elie does not move for fear of being hit himself. At his father's death, something deep inside himself feels free (106). It is not because he lost the struggle for survival that Elie feels the man in the mirror is a corpse (109); it is because he lost the struggle to remain human. He failed, as Akiba Drumer had put it, to "dominate [his] base instincts and kill the Satan within [him]" (42).
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