what would i do

In many works of literature, both fiction and nonfiction, the death of a character profoundly affects one or more of the other characters in the work. In his memoir Night,
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel describes how he watched his father die an agonizing death in a Nazi concentration camp, near the end of World War II. Elie also describes how his father’s torment and death affected him, transforming him into a hollow shell of a person.
When Elie and his father arrived at the camp, the older man, already greatly weakened, lacked the energy and the will to go on. His father saw the corpses buried under the snow but was so exhausted that he only wanted to join them. Elie knew that his father had given up and wished to die, but the teenager refused to abandon hope. He screamed at his father and argued with him, feeling that he was arguing with death itself.
Although Elie loved his father and wanted him to survive, he also longed to be free from the burden of helping him so that he could focus on his own struggle for survival. Of course, such thoughts filled Elie with tremendous feelings of guilt and shame. A sense of love and duty made Elie continue to care for his father, who was deathly ill with dysentery. Elie even gave some of his own meager ration of food to his father and did his best to comfort him.
When his father finally died, after a Nazi officer crushed his skull, Elie did not cry—he had suffered so much and had witnessed so much suffering that he had no tears left.
Elie spent two more months in the concentration camp before Allied troops finally arrived to liberate the camp. During those months, nothing mattered to Elie; the experience of his father’s death had paralyzed him physically and emotionally. Nothing could touch him, he said. He even stopped thinking about his father. Elie did nothing all day long; the only thing he wished to do was to eat. That is just what he and his fellow prisoners did when their liberators finally arrived: they threw themselves on the food that was offered and ate their fill. Elie gave no thought to his family or even to the idea of getting revenge on his tormentors. A few weeks later, while deathly ill with food poisoning, Elie dragged himself to a mirror and saw the image of a corpse staring back at him. The image showed the hollow, empty person Elie had become after witnessing and enduring so much physical and emotional suffering. He had witnessed not only his father’s horrific death, but also the deaths of so many others at the hands of the Nazis. Again and again, he had seen the face of evil—it was a human face, and he seemed to cope with it by ceasing to have any emotions at all. He had changed from a person who felt love and compassion for others, as well as hatred and the desire for revenge, to someone who felt almost nothing at all.
In the context of the overall work, the death of Elie’s father represents the death of hope. If his father could die, after all they had suffered and endured together, then why bother to struggle any longer? The timing of his death is particularly cruel, given that the war was nearly over.
Eventually, Elie Wiesel would become a world-famous advocate of human rights and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. The horror of his father’s death would never leave him, however. It has had a profound and lasting impact on his life