Thursday, February 4, 2010

How does the violence Elie sees in the concentration camps change him?

Elie changes in three distinct ways during his time in the concentration camps as a result of the violence he witnesses. First, he loses his faith in God. In three separate passages he expresses this loss of faith. In chapter two, at the reception center at Birkenau, just after the initial selection and seeing the bodies of children thrown into a burning pit, he writes, "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever." At Buna, after witnessing the slow hanging of the young "pipes," he says, referring to God, "Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows..." And on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, when other Jews are fasting, he refuses saying, "As I swallowed my bowl of soup, I saw in the gesture an act of rebellion and protest against Him."


Second, Elie is not able to defend his father. At first, he is fiercely loyal and sticks to his father. But, slowly, the violence wears him down. At Auschwitz, when his father is struck with colic a man beats him mercilessly and Elie doesn't defend him. He writes,



I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid.



In his father's final hours, as an SS officer beats him, Elie again is paralyzed by his own fear and unable to help. He writes, "I did not move. I was afraid." His father dies that night. 


Third, because of the horrors he has witnessed, apathy takes over Elie's life. He gradually becomes concerned with only one thing and that is food. After avoiding the extraction of his gold tooth in section three he writes,



I was a body. Perhaps less than that: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time. 



Over the course of about one year, Elie abandons his God, his father, and his interest in life in the face of the overwhelming violence in the Nazi death camps. 

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