Kaia Gleason

Period 3
Literary Analysis
May 8,2015
Night: Decent People into Brutes
People change when faced with death. Elie Wiesel witnessed this
transformation of good to evil with many of the inmates at Auschwitz. Jewish people
felt desperate to survive in the concentration camps. Some would go to unspeakable
lengths to live. One could have been a very pleasant person before arriving to the
camps, but in fear and despair, they would become cold and wicked. But its hard to
blame them, death lurked around every corner, and every day they remained alive at
Auschwitz was long and torturous. During the Holocaust, the most evil always won.
Elie Wiesel wrote of some of these switches of personalities in his book that
commemorates the millions of Jewish people who died during the Holocaust. One of
the first people to break under the pressure to live was Madame Shacter (24-28).
She was from Elies hometown, but was separated from her husband and eldest son by
accident on the way to Auschwitz. She began to scream and cry about fire. She paid
little attention to her 9 year old son and drove the other passengers of the cattle cars
they were forced to travel in crazy. Eventually, she was beaten so she would shut up.
Which is something that never would've never happened to a respectable woman if
the Jews hadnt been in that situation. Madame Shacter, once a strong, loving mother
who supported her whole family, had become practically insane in the cattle cars. She
had turned dark.

Ms. Shacter, however, was not the only one who switched personalities in order
to survive. Franek, an inmate Elie met at Aushwitz, was a Polish student from Warsaw.
Franek was the foreman of the electric warehouse Elie and his father worked at for a
while, and was kind enough to let them work by each other. But, as Franek became
more and more hungry, he also became more and more greedy. He forced Elie to give
him his gold crown, and when Elie refused, Franek would beat Elies father.
Eventually, Elie gave in and his crown was removed with a rusty spoon. Then Franek
took Elies ration of bread (44-45). A once kind, intelligent young man had become a
greedy, violent prisoner of war.
Later in the book, Elie sees another evil deed done by a once loyal son. Rabbi
Eliahu was a beloved Rabbi who led a small congregation in Poland. Throughout the
years at the concentration camps, Rabbi Eliahu and his son stuck together. But during
the marching, Rabbi Eliahu began to fall behind, to the end of the column. He thought
his son hadnt noticed and continued to run ahead. However, Elie saw that the son
had noticed, but was done carrying the burden of his father and decided to leave him
behind. Elie prayed that he would have the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahus
son had done (90-91).
Toward the end of the war, and the liberation of the camps, the people were
starving and suffering. At the beginning of the book, the Nazis were only able to hold
80 people per cattle car, but now they had space for 100. All people thought about
was food. They would do anything to get a crust of bread. Meir and his father (pg.
101-102), strangers to Elie, fell victim to their demons. After pulling into a German
town, some of the citizens were cruel enough to throw crusts of bread in the cattle

cars for their own amusement. The prisoners were thrashing and fighting for the
smallest crumb. They had been starving for weeks on end. An old man had gotten
ahold of a crust, but before he could eat it, someone jumped on top of him. It was
Meir, the old mans son, who was slowly killing him for a crust of bread. No one unless
put into that situation would ever kill their own father. Its unfathomable for most
decent people, which Im sure Meir was at one point. Luckily for Elie and Schlomo,
they were able to keep the humanity within themselves.
In concentration camps and throughout the Holocaust, people put in danger
would do anything to survive. It is often said that in war, it is the most evil that usual
persevere. Jewish prisoners needed to survive, and in order to do that they had to do
some unimaginably horrible things to do so. It isnt all their fault, they were
surrounded by evil for years on end. Just in Night, we had several examples of the
change between good and evil. There was Ms. Shacter, who went mad in the packed
cattle cars, Franek who took Elies gold tooth and ration of soup, Rabbi Eliahus son
who left his father to die in the snow, and lastly, Meir who killed his own father for a
crust of bread. The evil and pressure to survive in the concentration camps had taken
over the prisoners pure souls and made them inhumane and cold.

Work Cited
Wiesel, Elie, and Marion Wiesel. Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a Division of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Print.