"Night" Maintaining Humanity 2-18

Based off where we are as a class in the book "Night", I've decided to focus this blog on Elie's struggle and efforts to maintain his humanity and identity as a person, during his life at the concentration camps.  While Jews stayed at these concentration camps, they were stripped and torn from any piece of their identity.  Clothes, names, hair, and any other personal possessions (watches, pictures, jewelry, etc.) were forcefully taken from them.

Elie realizes that he must be strong and keep life in him for not only himself but for his father as well.  We can understand how any feeling and emotion can be drained from someone when you're literally taking away what makes them who they are, and this begins to have an effect on Elie too.  We see part of this vacancy after the first hangings when Elie thinks the soup tastes really good, and doesn't hardly seem to be giving the hangings a second thought.  This goes to show how the mass destruction, and devastation was thrown into the Jews' lives and they became used to it and insensitive or immune to the thousands of deaths around them.

However, after the second hangings, Elie experiences a different reaction.  He thinks that the soup tastes like corpses and this tells readers that these deaths do have some sort of effect on Elie.  In the first hanging, readers are shown the hope and emotion in Elie's body depleting and draining, but we do see that there is hope left and the fight to remain sane and human will continue.  I can predict that this struggle will become much more harder in the future as his father becomes weaker and weaker, and probably closer and closer to death.