In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel reflects on his childhood during the Holocaust and the years he spent enslaved at Auschwitz. Wiesel shares this disturbing experience with his father, both of them searching for a sign of life from a world of torture and isolation. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel exhibits the relationships of other fathers and sons as well as his own. While the other father-son relationships Wiesel exhibits hurt their own chance of survival, Wiesel’s connection with his father ultimately keeps him alive physically, but kills him emotionally.
Wiesel's relationship with his father is stronger than the other father-son relationships he discusses throughout the memoir. Wiesel discusses the father-son relationships of Rabbi Eliahu’s son who abandoned him and the father and son fighting for bread on the train. When the Nazis evacuate Wiesel and the other prisoners from Auschwitz, they run for miles until they arrive at an abandoned village. The existence of Wiesel’s father is hanging onto life by a thread. Wiesel constantly fears what this would mean for him if he loses his father. This puts Wiesel in a state of desperation to keep his father alive. When Rabbi Eliahu, who lost his son in the commotion, asks Wiesel if he has seen him, Wiesel says he has not. But then Wiesel remembers that his son “had seen [the Rabbi] losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column… and he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater” (91) as if he wanted to leave his father. This thought haunts Wiesel and he prays to God to give him “the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done” (91) as Wiesel knew that his father was all he had left. While Rabbi Eliahu’s son made the decision to leave his father for his own survival, Wiesel’s relationship with his father prevents him from doing the same action. After they evacuate, the prisoners learn that they are traveling to the center of Germany. Occasionally, the jam-packed trains the Nazis held the prisoners in passed through outer German towns. The German workers would throw bread into the trains and watch the “dozens of starving men [fighting] desperately over a few crumbs” (100) for they would do anything to satisfy their hunger. Wiesel watches an old man hide a piece of bread under his shirt leading his son to attack him. The old man is yelling “Meir, my little Mier! Don’t you recognize me… You’re killing your father… I have bread… for you too,” (101) but his words meant nothing. Hunger took over the son’s morality and he would do anything for even a little piece of bread.
Wiesel’s relationship with his father helps him stay alive during the Holocaust. When the Nazis take Wiesel and his family into the camp, they separate him from his mother and sisters and he would never see them again. At this moment, Wiesel realizes it was “imperative to stay” (30) with his father in order to survive. When Wiesel sees the Nazis burning human beings to death, he tells his father that he does not “want to wait. [He’ll] run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames” (33) that have already devoured thousands of bodies. Wiesel counts his steps left to the pit of fire, he says goodbye to his father in his mind and prepares himself “in order to break rank and throw [himself] onto the barbed wire” to escape the torture he was in. It seemed that Wiesel only had two steps left to make his decision of whether or not to take his own life until the Nazis ordered them to go to the barracks. The action Wiesel takes of squeezing his father’s hand immediately after the Nazi’s herd them into the barracks concludes that the only reason Wiesel did not kill himself was because of his father. It also shows a promise that he will never leave his father’s side.
The death of Wiesel’s father presents Wiesel with relief that immediately turns into guilt and shame. When Wiesel wakes up in the morning daylight, the first thing he remembers that he had a father that he had now lost. At the same time Wiesel blames himself for abandoning his father, a thought appears in his mind that he “were relieved of this responsibility, [he] could use all [his] strength to fight for [his] own survival” (106) and not his father’s as well. Wiesel became disgusted with himself and “instantly, [he] felt ashamed, ashamed of [himself] forever” (106) that this thought had even entered his mind in the first place. When Wiesel says this, it concludes that although he physically survived, his soul did not. Wiesel’s relationship with his father is essential to the creation of Night because it gave Wiesel the strength and motivation to stay alive during the Holocaust to ultimately tell his story. Night allows the horrific memories and experiences of those who lived through the Holocaust to be remembered.