Night

In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, it becomes clear over the course of the plot that when humans are faced with protecting their own ethics, they abandon their morals and values of everyday life. This can be proven true through the acts of the German Nazis along with the challenges faced by the Jewish people. The Nazism’s acts towards the Jewish community were inhumanely cruel and repugnant while the Jewish captives lost their morals as they fought for survival at multiple concentration camps. The German soldiers can be labeled as misanthropes if it wasn’t for the excuse that they abandoned their morals for their own survival against the German rule. The Nazis were cruel to others and rejected the Jewish existence by treating them less than human and more like animals. Wiesel demonstrates this idea by the Jews being packed into cattle cars, tormented by unbearable conditions. “There almost no air to breathe, the heat is intense, there is no room to sit, and everyone is hungry and thirsty” (Wiesel 23). Another example, "There are 80 of you in the car, the German officer added, if any one of you goes missing, you will all be shot like dogs" (Wiesel 24). In this quote Elie Wiesel shows how brutal the Germans were in deporting the Jews; packed into cattle cars and referred to as “dogs”. In their fear, the Jews began to lose their sense of public decorum and turned on one another whether it was a father or friend. Individual survival was number one on everyone’s mind. Many of the soldiers were cognizant that their actions and the atrocities that were committed were morally wrong but they refused to speak out because of fear of repercussions from the government. Daniel Schwarz describes such horrific event as “the conflict between silence and the scream, the battle between life and death”, intrinsically about the Germans questioning to speak up or not against the Nazi Regime. The Jewish communities began with supporting one another until each individual survival was put up front. For example, when the Jewish people were The Jewish people were exiled' From Aushwitz bc the Russians were coming --- They fended for themselves Whoever slowed down were shot Mental strength --- Elie and wFather and Zalman pushed each other on… (86) Another example occurred earlier during deportation; an old man pulled a piece of bread from his pocket which leads to him being killed. The irony of this event was that one of the men to jump for the bread was his son; this clearly shows the lengths of people going to survive. As the Jews face the prospect of death, they lose faith in God and move to protect themselves rather than helping others