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Examples Of Survival In Night By Elie Wiesel

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The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, is an account of his personal experience of the Holocaust. In Night, Elie is seized from his home and transferred to concentrations camps. When Elie arrives at the first concentration camp, he is separated from his mother and sisters, leaving only his father and him to survive the horror together. Elie is finally saved when the Americans arrive and liberates the camp from the Germans. The nature of survival and self preservation is shown as being the most important objective within the book. Night displays that when a person’s life is at stake, he/she will put survival before bodily needs, pain, and family.
Bodily needs, like the desire to sleep are resisted in Night, due to the possibility of survival being diminished by such needs. Elie has been marching for hours and is finally given the chance to rest. He is exhausted and wishes to fall asleep and regain some strength. Elie was just awoken by his father and his father tells him that if someone falls asleep, “One falls asleep forever” (Wiesel 88). Elie reluctantly “got up, with clenched teeth” and stayed awake with his father (Wiesel 88). Elie understands that if he falls asleep in the snow that he will never wake up again, so he instead resists the desire to sleep and chooses survival over his bodily desires. …show more content…
Elie has just undergone a surgery on his foot to remove a build-up of pus and has heard that the camp would be evacuated. Elie and his father are deciding on whether or not to be evacuated with the rest of the camp. Elie decides to be evacuated and he says, “Let’s be evacuated with the others,” to his father (Wiesel 82). Elie decides that his survival is more important than the pain in his foot, so he decides to suffer through it and be evacuated with the others. Even though his foot is in intense pain he does not let his mind waver from his main goal of

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