Free Essay on Night by Elie Wiesel

James Goldsmith once said that “tolerance is a tremendous virtue, but the immediate neighbors of tolerance are apathy and weakness.” Apathy means to have a lack of interest or concern in someone or something. Also, apathy can mean to have a lack of feeling or emotion. In general, many people can be apathetic without anything “wrong” with them... it’s just their personality. In my own words, apathy means to be emotionally “numb.” All in all, many people-including those discussed in Night can be apathetic. 

Elie Wiesel is the author of the memoir, which is titled Night. Not only is he the author of this book, but he is a Holocaust survivor. In Night, Wiesel describes times of sadness, despair, and happiness between him and his fellow inmates. Seeing that some of the inmates portrayed in Night by Wiesel were separated from their loved ones-sometimes temporarily or permanently, they had to have something else to cope with what was happening other than faith, love, hope, etc. 

Taking this into consideration, there were a host of other things that they could have used, with one of which being apathy. “Willpower is the key to success. Successful people strive no matter what they feel by applying their will to overcome apathy, doubt or fear.” - Dan Millman. What this quote means, is that in order to do great things with your life, you must overcome many difficulties that you are facing without giving into temptation. This supports my point, because oftentimes the prisoners gave into temptation and resorted to becoming “numb” and blocking off everyone and everything around themselves. These prisoners no longer believed that the situation could be helped, so instead of being sad about the situation presented to them, they just used apathy as a coping mechanism. 

During Elie Wiesel's time in the concentration camps, he often dealt with the SS (short for Schutzstaffel). They were described by him and others as being harsh to the prisoners. Even though the SS came off as being apathetic and harsh, can there be a possibility that they were just using apathy to mask their inner sorrow, as some of the prisoners did? Or... did the SS just do as they were told, “programmed” in a sense to not have the slightest amount of pity for anyone around them? 

Here is a quote and an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Night. “Men to the left! Women to the right!” Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother." What this quote means is that the SS officer giving out orders to the prisoners did not have much regard for what the impact of these eight words would have on them... they were just looking to get the job done. This quote supports my point because it shows that, in fact the SS officers were probably used to giving out orders similar to (or worse than) this. Also, it shows how people can get very adjusted to doing something over time-no matter how gruesome or life-changing it is, and have no real emotion about it whatsoever.

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