the "gratitude of a wounded animal." He gives his father his share of the rations and tries to comfort him as best he can. Eventually, Chlomo grows too weak to even get up to relieve himself, angering the other inmates.

His death comes one night when he is crying out for Elie. Terrified of the camp guards, Elie does not move, even when his father is beaten on the head by an SS officer. By the next morning, his father's place has been filled by another prisoner. Elie feels both relief and guilt over the matter.

Night by Elie Wiesel is Elie's autobiographical story of his time in several concentration camps during Hitler's reign of terror against the Jewish people during World War II.

Before they are shipped off to the camps, Elie's father is a prominent figure in the Jewish community. He is rather careless about his family and the day-to-day lives they lived, but he is a good man. 

When things got bad enough, he had several chances to take his family away and escape the tragedy, but he did not really believe things were as bad as others seemed to realize.

When they get to the camp, Elie and his father are separated from the female members of the family, so the rest of the story is about the two of them. Elie's father is quite ill-suited to hard labor and stern taskmasters, and there are times when Elie rather wishes his father would just kind of "tough up" a bit. Despite that, he is a good father who does his best to take care of his son.

The dehumanization begins early, and there comes a time when Elie does not even respond emotionally when his father is mistreated by the guards. Instead, Elie, like all of the prisoners, really only has the physical and emotional energy to worry about his own survival.

Several times throughout the story, Elie's father narrowly escapes selection--being sent to the death chambers. His physical condition slowly deteriorates, of course, due to the living conditions in which they all live. Things rapidly get worse for the older man when the prisoners are all forced to march to a new camp in the bitter cold and snow.

Elie nearly dies when he falls asleep in the snow, but his father rouses him and saves his life. When they eventually arrive at Buchenwald, however, Elie's father has no more strength and begins to deteriorate. He is constantly feverish and suffers from dysentery (chronic diarrhea), and the guards no longer want to waste any food on a man they can see is so near death. 

At times, Elie's father does not even recognize his son and seems to be already in another place, a better place. Other prisoners beat him up when Elie is not there to protect him. His father is in unbearable pain and wants something to quench the burning on his insides. Elie cannot help.

On January 29, Eli wakes up and someone else is sleeping in his father's cot. Elie recounts it this way:

They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing....

No prayers were said over his tomb.No candle lit his memory. His last word had been my name.He had called out to me and I had not answered. 

It is sad to say, but Elie's father died from the same thing so many others died from--simple neglect and constant abuse. His body just could not sustain itself given the treatment he was exposed to in the camps and, like so many others, he just quite breathing.

It is, of course, possible that he was not dead when he was taken away and actually died in a fiery furnace; however, he would have died imminently in any case. The reality in either scenario is that his body just could not sustain life any longer.

Near the end of Night, Elie Wiesel writes that on January 28, 1945, he went to sleep with father lying in the bunk below him. The next day, he awoke at dawn to find someone else in the bed. His father had been taken away to the crematorium, perhaps still breathing, and had no funeral or any other formalities to mark his passing.

Wiesel writes that he did no weep for his father's death. He felt guilty for his lack of emotion, but he was "out of tears." The exhausting nature of life in the concentration camp has left him without the ability to express or even feel the most basic emotions. His only faint emotion was that he finally felt free of responsibility without the task of caring for his father.

In the following chapter, Wiesel remarks that the period in which he felt the greatest apathy and indifference to his fate began with his father's death. He later came to see how profoundly this event had affected him. However, in the immediate aftermath, he was too exhausted and traumatized to feel anything at all strongly. The sense of freedom and relief was linked to the apathy he felt, since his main attachment to life was now gone.

His father's death comes as something of a relief to Elie. That's not to say that he isn't sad that his father passed away. It's just that the he had been sick for quite some time, and Elie is glad that his father will no longer have to suffer. Elie is also somewhat relieved that he'll no longer have to take care of his old man when it's already so difficult to take care of himself.

Elie has become so numbed by the many experiences of death he's had to endure that he feels numb upon learning of the death of his father. Death is ever-present in the camp, and after a while, it comes to seem normal. That being the case, Elie can't react to death in the normal human way, in the way that he would like to; he's become desensitized to it to such an extent that he can't even weep over the death of his father.

What Elie's experience illustrates is the way in which the Nazis have dehumanized their captives, cutting them off from the normal run of feelings, including the usual expressions of grief for the death of a loved one.

A short time after arriving at Buchenwald, Elie mentions that his father had dysentery and was extremely weak. Elie has to care for his father and saves his life several times toward the end of the novel.

Elie recalls bringing his incapacitated father water and staring at him for an extended period of time before climbing into his bunk during roll call. The next morning, Elie climbs down from his bunk to discover that his father has died during the night. After suffering through the arduous conditions of various camps with his father and surviving the inhumane treatment, Elie finally gives up hope after his father dies. Deep inside, Elie is happy that his father is finally free, but is overwhelmed with grief and becomes numb. Elie mentions that after his father's death, his only concern is his next meal. Elie spends his remaining days in the camp in "total idleness." 

Elie reveals contrasting feelings toward his father at the end of Night when the man is on the brink of death from dysentery. Through most of the novel he tries to be loyal to his father, but he is often unable and even unwilling to defend him. In section eight he wants to help him and even offers him soup, but there is really very little he can do and the doctors are no help. He is told by the head of the block at Buchenwald to look out only for himself and that in the camp there are "no fathers, no brothers, no friends." Elie is paralyzed by fear as his father's cry for water brings an attack from an SS officer who "dealt him a violent blow on the head." Elie's only response is to stay "gazing at him for over an hour, engraving into myself the picture of his blood stained face, his shattered skull."

Elie can do nothing, and when he awakens the next morning his father is gone, replaced by another prisoner. He reports that he could not even weep for his father's death and that his only response was to feel that he was finally free, free from constantly worrying and agonizing over the fate of his father.

When Elie discovers that his father died during the night, he mentions that he could not weep because he was all out of tears. Elie also says that, if he could search the recesses of his heart, he may have been able to say, "Free at last!" (Wiesel 137).

Following the death of his father, Elie spends the rest of his days in total idleness and mentions that nothing matters to him anymore. Throughout Elie's experience during the Holocaust, he relied on his father and lived for him; Elie's father gave him the motivation to continue living—in order to support him every step of the way.

Following the death of his father, Elie becomes emotionally numb to everything and is only focused on his next meal. The tragic death of Elie's father negatively impacts his mental state, and Elie completely loses his motivation to live. Fortunately, Elie and the remaining Jewish prisoners are evacuated by the Americans, and he survives the Holocaust.

Elie's father is presented by his son as a respected member of the Jewish community in Sighet. However, like many in positions of authority, he doesn't pay serious attention to the imminent threat posed by the Germans. Nevertheless, once he's been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, he's completely disabused of all his illusions. No longer an optimist, Shlomo becomes physically and psychologically weaker as a result of his brutal treatment in the camp. The roles of father and son become completely reversed; it is Elie who must be strong for his father as he declines day by day. In this desperate fight for survival, Shlomo comes to seem almost a burden to his son. Yet at the same time his presence prevents Elie from selfishness, from succumbing to the law of the jungle.

Early in Night, Elie Wiesel describes his father as someone who seems to care about others in the community more than his family. Wiesel writes,

"My father was a cultured, rather unsentimental man. There was never any display of emotion, even at home. He was more concerned with others than with his own family." (Wiesel 2)

Elie's father was a no-nonsense kind of man--someone who was very respected in the community of Sighet, where they lived before the Nazis came. The Wiesels had a shop where Elie's parents and sisters worked, but Elie was required to go to school. When Mr. Wiesel was not working, he was attending to matters in the village.

Later, Elie's father becomes a shadow of his former self. The constant torment in the camps beats him down, and he becomes very weak. He is no longer the strong man Elie knew before they were imprisoned. This is one of the hardest things for Elie to witness--the breaking of his father.