Becoming Less Than Human

L K
Teacher
English 12
11/25/11

Becoming Less Than Human
Have you ever wanted to read a powerful gut wrenching story that could permanently change your thinking on a particular issue? Night by Elie Wiesel is a story that has touched many lives and that no one wants to read, but must. It is astonishing that anyone could have faced what Elie Wiesel did and still survived both mentally and physically. Although everyone around him gave up and gave in and became less than human, he fought through. Even through the horror and the pain of it all, Elie remained standing to tell the story of the atrocities of man and how it turned even the most humble people into a living corpse with one goal: to survive.
Throughout his story Wiesel describes the brutality of the SS and how it only continued to worsen. During the march towards the end of his experience under the control of the SS and the concentration camps, Elie explains how Rabbi Eliahou, a very good man, had lost his son in the crowd. With pain Elie remembers, “A terrible thought loomed up in my mind: he had wanted to get rid of his father! He had felt that his father was growing weak,” (Wiesel 87). Elie proves that even a good and decent son who had remained with his father, Rabbi Eliahou, for three years, had turned cold against his own father. And even though the SS had turned the Jews’ hearts dark and cold toward each other, it challenged Elie to pray that God would not allow him to turn cold toward his father.
Elie wants to make a strong and clear point about what atrocities and cruel treatment do to even the most decent man and show human nature at its worst using his own personal experiences. A strong example was when the German workmen threw bread into a wagon and he goes on to write, “Dozens of starving men fought each other to the death for a few crumbs.” (Wiesel 95). Wiesel was being completely literal. The Jews killed each other just to have a piece of bread and cared for no one’s survival but...