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“Father and Son Relationships�? in Elie Wiesel's “Night.�? Essay Example

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“Father and Son Relationships�? in Elie Wiesel's “Night.�? Essay Example
“Father and Son Relationships” in Elie Wiesel’s “Night.”

In the short story “The Night,” Elie Wiesel explores that how father and son ruin their relationship in the period of the anti-Semitism. They lose their appearance, lovely life and wealth for being Jews. Elie and his family, as well as numerous other families, were kidnapped from their homes by the German Nazis and were forced to work in concentration camps because of their Jewish heritage. The Jews were required to work day and night and were treated like animals. Elie and his father were separated from his mother and sister, whom Elie would never see again. Although Elie and his father managed to get along in the concentration camps, not all sons got along with the fathers. The fathers in the story were usually the more caring ones. The sons, on the other hand, were the ones that abused and neglected their fathers. The sons may have acted this cruelly and vicious towards their fathers because of the severe treatments they had received from the Germans, to separate themselves from nuisances, and their awareness of the necessity for their own survival. While in the German concentration camps, the Jews had an immense amount of hard punishment put on prisoners for no apparent reason. Soon, the hearts of the people in the concentration camps were hardened. When Elie witnessed a hanging, he no longer cared about who had died, and neither did the other people. "I watched other hangings. I never saw a single one victim weep. These withered bodies had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears" (63). The people of the concentration camps did not care much anymore about death nor anything. This was also true in the children. One example of a child acting differently due to the suffering that was put upon him was when Elie's father had just been struck before him, and Elie did not feel any sympathy or any emotion towards his father; "My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had

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