Elie Wiesel as a Survivor of the Holocaust

2000 Words8 Pages
Six million perished in the flames, mass shootings and gas chambers of concentration camps during the Holocaust. This started when the Nazi party established a “Final Solution” that sought out to eradicate the inferior Jewish race from Germany and the world (“Holocaust”). A person cannot look at this event and see nothing except for the dark, evil side of human nature. However, if a person looks at the Holocaust from a survivor’s point of view, they can see the good side of human nature, especially if someone looks at it from Elie Wiesel’s perspective. Elie Wiesel and his family were Romanian Jews who were, unfortunately, swept into the Holocaust’s horrors. Elie managed to escape the Holocaust using tools of survival, including love for…show more content…
When someone takes another’s hair, clothing or anything else that makes them unique, that person takes away their identity and, therefore, their humanity. This is even more so when the deceased are not given proper burials and their remains combined and recycled as gardening materials and money for the Nazis. Everything that made these people human was stripped, cut and burned from them. The dark side of human nature comes out in situations like the Holocaust when people struggle with the obstacles that life throws at them. They naturally push all of their woes towards others to attempt to justify their issues and make them feel like they have control over their lives. On the other hand, these people do not always succeed in completely dictating others’ lives. Survivors like Elie Wiesel prove that the good side of human nature can arise even during times as malevolent as the Holocaust. Elie used certain tools of survival, such as love for family. This is seen when Elie and his father are on the train to a concentration camp, and the dead are periodically thrown off the train. At one stop, Elie’s father appeared to be a corpse. Elie screamed at the men who tried to throw his father out of the train. Elie hit him several times to try and wake his father up, and his father eventually woke up (Wiesel 98-99). This action shows the survivor quality of love for family because Elie depends on his father’s companionship and his father depends on Elie to survive. They
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