In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel spoke about his experience as a young Jewish boy in the Nazi concentration camps. During this turbulent time period, Elie described the horrifying events that he lived through and how that affected the relationship with his father. Throughout the book, Elie and his father’s relationship faced many obstacles. In the beginning, Elie and his father have much respect for one another and at the end of the book, that relationship became a burden and a feeling of guilt. Their relationship took a great toll on them throughout their journey in the concentration camps.
As the story begins, Wiesel said, “My father was a cultured man, rather unsentimental. He rarely displayed his feelings, not even with his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kind”. Chlomo, Elie’s father, was well respected in the Jewish community of Sighet. In Sighet, numerous members of the community came to meet with him for many unknown reasons. Wiesel felt that his father devoted too much time to make others happy and not enough to time with his own family. When Elie decided to take his studies of religion into greater exploration, his father dismissed his idea and claimed that he was too young. This is proof that the two did not have a strong bond but many different views of how to do things in life.
Their lives took a turn for the worst when the Wiesel family were forcefully taken and placed into cattle cars to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. Elie’s view began to change and he started to see his father as someone who he admires and did not want to lose. As the family arrived at Birkenau they are given the order "Women and children to the left. Men to the right." Elie was young and could have gone with either his mother and sister or father, but instead he decided to stay with his father who would have stayed all by himself if Elie had not joined him. At this moment,
Cited: Wiesel, Elie. Night. 1st ed. New York: Hill & Wang, 2006.