Excuse for Survival

        Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust by chance. He is quite sure of that. He also doesn't know why he survived. That is why he wrote Night, to take advantage of the fact that he survived the holocaust. I didn't like the first 46 pages I read. Not because I thought it was bad writing, but because it was about a subject so strong, so powerful, that I truly didn't want to read it. I didn't want to have to go to sleep thinking about humans mercilessly killing other human beings. But that is why Elie Wiesel wrote this book; so people who have never gone through something as horrifying as the Holocaust can think about what happened in knowledge. Last night when I went to bed I didn't think about what the dying Jews felt, I thought about what the Jews who were left alive felt. I wondered if they hoped for death, or if they still clinged to the possible idea of life beyond Aushwitz. I think that if I was in their position, I would just want to get death over with. 

     In Elie Wiesel's forward he writes "I don't know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself?" I felt like the fact that Elie Wiesel was writing this meant that he had laid down trying to sleep, but wishing himself dead. I think that is a crime worse than killing somebody, hurting them so much that they wish death upon themselves. Because to kill somebody puts them to rest, but to make somebody want to rest but not letting them, that is terrible. That is what I thought about after I read Night. 

     Elie Wiesel wrote to spread a thought not a message. But he also wrote to appease himself. He wanted to give himself a reason to live. In his position, after surviving something that hardly anyone else in his kind had survived, he wanted to give himself an excuse for living. His excuse was to tell everyone what he had been through. And by doing this, he became one of the most famous authors in history. And by doing so, he spread around his stories that have meaning to people all around the world.