of Sighet held him in highest esteem; his advice on public and even private matters was frequently sought.

Wiesel respected his father but did not feel that he knew him particularly well. This changed when they were together in the camps, where there was no privacy and the two had to depend on each other for survival.

Even before they are interned, Wiesel sees his father cry for the first time, and he has to hold his hand tightly when they are separated from his mother and sisters. His greatest concern at the beginning of their time in the camp is not to be separated from his father, and this is repeated whenever they are moved from camp to camp.

As the two become emotionally closer, Wiesel’s father becomes weaker and more ill. Other prisoners say that he cannot afford to look after his father since it is every man for himself in the camp, but Wiesel does not heed their advice. When his father finally dies, he is distraught.

Before they enter the camps, Wiesel’s father behaves like a typically traditional, old-fashioned father. However, through the trials they have to face, the two become more like brothers and, by the end of his life, Wiesel is caring and making sacrifices for his father as though their roles were reversed and his father were his son.

Before Elie and his father become prisoners, they do not spend much time around each other. Elie is focused on his religious studies and spends most of his time in the synagogue while his father attends community matters. However, once they become prisoners and enter the concentration camps, Elie and his father become inseparable. Their relationship improves, and the two essentially live for one another. Initially, Elie's father takes care of him, and Elie follows his lead. Elie's father gives him valuable advice, shares food, and even gives Elie his utensils before entering the second selection. Fortunately, Elie and father get to work next to each other in Buna, and they both benefit from their relationship. Elie even attempts to teach his father how to march properly in order to avoid beatings. Unfortunately, Elie's father becomes extremely ill, and Elie is forced to provide for him. Even though Elie briefly thinks about abandoning his father, he does not, and he continues to fight for his father's survival. After Elie's father dies, he becomes deeply depressed and feels like life is not worth living anymore.

Their time in the concentration camps brought them closer and helped them build a relationship despite the circumstances. Prior to their imprisonment, Eliezer’s time was split between school and religious studies; on the other hand, his father’s time was dedicated to the community and other leadership responsibilities. Thus, father and son did not spend enough time together, making their relationship somewhat distant.

Eliezer and his father are inseparable throughout the different camps and are each afraid of losing the other. The situation at the camps forces them to live for each other, and they believe their bond provided the best opportunity for survival. The two even make decisions together; for instance, during the evacuation from Buna. Although there are times that Eliezer feels that having his father around is a burden, he does not act on these feelings. He fights for his father until the end.

Eliezer and his father have stuck together in the camp , and stayed strong for each other throughout most of their ordeal. This is in contrast to their relationship before their imprisonment. Eliezer was aware of his father's concern for others before his own family, and he greatly resented it.

But the time of crisis brings the father and son together for a time, at one point only holding themselves together for the sake of the other. Yet, when his father contracts dysentery, Eliezer begins to resent having to take care of his father. He begins to think of him as a burden, and for a time, considers taking his rations. When they take his father to the crematorium, still breathing, Eliezer only stands and watches , without emotion.

In the beginning of Weisel's story, he has almost no relationship with his father.  His father is a busy community leader and his duties leave little time for interaction with his son.  Elie laments this lack of connection in his earlier years, and some bitterness in his father's alienation is present as well.  As early as page 2, he recalls that his father was :   "more concerned with others than with his own family."

However, the horrors of the Camps make the pair value their relationship.  As the terrors they endure esclate, Elie has "one thought - not to lose [his father]."  When the father and son experience the New Year, the relationship has completely transformed, from one of alienation, to one of protection, to one of closeness.  The author says, as the two contemplate their future (or possible lack of future) that they had "never understood one another so clearly."

The relationship between Elie and his father changes during their time in Auschwitz, as the child becomes caregiver to the parent. This dynamic is one that occurs in many instances in the outside world, but it usually happens more gradually over time and generally later in the lives of the two individuals as the parent nears old age. In the case of Elie and his father, both are relatively young, but the horrible conditions they endure in the camps and fear they feel every minute of every day ages them (more so the father) prematurely. Elie’s father becomes weak and is an old man by the time he dies towards the end of the book. In fact, Elie's father was only 50 years old at the time of his death.

Elie takes care of him throughout most of their time in the camps, just as the father cares for him. They become much closer than they had been before the camp. Elie worries about his father, and he gives his father his soup when his father has not eaten. This is a major sacrifice for Elie to make because the portions are very small to begin with and there is almost no substance to the soup; it is mostly water and hardly filling. Elie’s sacrifice of his soup for his father is an act that is more like one a parent performs for a child.

While it is true that Elie feels some sense that his father is a burden as his father’s health fails, this is something that Elie feels enormous guilt about. Moreover, he does not abandon his father the way another son in the camp abandons his by walking so far ahead that the father cannot keep up with his pace.

The traditional father/son dynamic undergoes something of a reversal during Night. Long before Shlomo passes away, it's Elie who acts as the father and Shlomo who becomes the son. Even then, the new relationship is somewhat complicated. Due to the atrocious conditions inside Auschwitz, Elie finds it nigh impossible to discharge his duties as a surrogate father. He is so preoccupied with his own desperate fight for survival that he has no energy left to render assistance to his increasingly weak and fragile father.

As Shlomo's health starts to go downhill, Elie comes to feel that his father is becoming a burden, a burden he can no longer carry. Barely able to take care of himself, he finds it almost impossible to take care of someone else, even if it is his closest surviving relative.

Even when Shlomo is beaten to within an inch of life on not one, but two occasions, Elie does nothing to intervene. In the second such case, when Shlomo is viciously attacked by an SS guard, Elie is too preoccupied with getting something to eat to do anything about it.

When Shlomo eventually passes away, Elie cannot cry. His experiences are such that he has nothing left inside. And besides, he's honest enough to admit to himself that his father's death releases him from a mighty burden.

Night gives us a firsthand account of the horrors that the Jews faced during WW 2. Elie Weisel's experiences in the concentration camp take us into a world where death and sacrifice were made daily. Elie and his father are kept together when they first arrive at Auschwitz. They are thought to be strong, healthy men who can do hard manual labor. Elie wants to stay close to his father, at first, to make sure he stays alive. However, as the story progresses, we see that Elie grows to resent his father. When his father becomes ill, Elie feels disgust with his father. When his father is beaten, Elie is mad at his father, not the officer, for just letting himself get beat. 

Elie also resents the fact that he is now taking on the role of caregiver to his father. Elie is torn about his feelings for his father. On the one hand he wants to try to protect his father, and on the other hand, he wants to be away from him. 

"(Rabbi Eliahou's son) had felt that his father was growing weak, he had believed that the end was near and had sought this separation in order to get rid of the burden, to free himself from an encumbrance which could lessen his own chances of survival. I had done well to forget that. And I was glad that Rabbi Eliahou should continue to look for his beloved son. And, in spite of myself, a prayer rose in my heart, to that God in whom I no longer believed. My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done."

Elie wanted to honor his father and do what was right by him. When he makes the prayer to never do what others had done, he genuinely wants to do what he thinks is right, but by the time his father dies, Elie feels a sense of freedom. He, in fact, did the exact same thing the Rabbi's son had done. He had forgotten what his prayer was. Elie goes through all the human emotions a person can go through, and he takes us along with him. May we never forget, Elie.

Elie Wiesel, in his novel Night, is very open and honest about his relationship with his father during their time in Auschwitz. IN the beginning, Elie refuses to leave his father's side. He insures, through his answers to the guards and his actions (at one time running to his father when he is sent to the opposite side). As the novel moves forward, depicting their time in the camps, Elie is recalls times where he considered leaving his father. Especially when his father is ill with dysentery, another prisoner states that Elie should be eating his father's portions. For a moment, Elie considers this. Soon after, his shame forces him to reconsider.

By the end, when Elie's father finally dies, Elie finally feels free. While this forces Elie to feel horrible, he still admits that he feels free to worry only about himself.

Essentially, the relationship between Elie and his father changes dramatically. In the beginning, they are both very concerned with the health and safety of the other. By the end, Elie realizes that he has a better chance of surviving on his own.

Elie and his father have a very close relationship and rely on each other to survive the horrific conditions of the Holocaust. After being separated from the females members of their family, Elie and his father remain by each other's side for the majority of their time in captivity. Both father and son rely on each other for moral support, advice, and resources. Elie and his father share their food rations with each other, go out of their way to avoid violent officers, and keep each other awake when they are close to death. Both father and son motivate each other to remain alive and are hopeful that they will one day survive the horrific ordeal. Elie and his father are fortunate enough to work side-by-side in an electrical warehouse and live together in the multiple concentration camps they inhabit. Elie's father becomes his sole motivation to survive and Elie tries his best to save his father when he is inflicted with dysentery. Tragically, Elie cannot save his father and is devastated when he discovers that his father passed away during the night. Following his father's death, Elie becomes emotionally numb and simply lives to eat. He loses all hope and no longer cares about surviving until the camp is liberated by the Allied soldiers. Overall, Elie's strong bond with his father motivates and enables him to survive the Holocaust.

I think that the relationship between Elie and his father is portrayed in a very unique way throughout the work.  On one hand, there are definite aspects of adolescent challenges within their relationship.  This consists of being embarrassed at times by his father and sense of seeking to establish his own independence are present in Elie's connection to his father.  Yet, there are some unique aspects within their relationship which are forced by the condition of the Holocaust.  For example, the ending of the work, where Elie awakens one morning to find his father gone, and the sense of emptiness this creates is combined with the hollow reality caused by the inescapable presences of death and suffering.  This is anything but typical in an adolescent relationship.  At the same time, when Elie has to make consistent choices about whether to continue with his father, who is in ailing health, it represents a moment of choice that is different than most relationships between adolescent fathers and sons.

Elie and his father have a changing relationship in the memoir.  At the beginning, their relationship is a typical older father--know-it-all son relationship.  Elie's father doesn't have much use for Elie's interests (Cabbalism), and Elie sees his father as distant from him and nonchalant about the warning signs of the approaching deportation.

In the book's middle chapters, Elie and his father become equals.  Elie, the physically stronger of the pair, ensures his own survival, and his father tries to encourage Elie emotionally and psychologically.

Finally, near the end of Night when Chlomo's health deteriorates,Elie takes over the "adult" role by caring for his father and making life-or-death decisions.

Ironically, in the midst of something as abnormal and horrific as the concentration camps and Holocaust, Elie and his father's relationship follows the typical pattern of most father-son relationships, just at an advanced speed, for many adults in today's society find themselves in roles of authority over their aging parents, providing for them physically and emotionally, just as Elie had to do for his father, even when he was just a teen.

Over the course of his hellish experiences, Eliezer increasingly comes to feel that his father is a burden. Like every other prisoner in Auschwitz, Eliezer's whole purpose in life is to survive, and looking out for his father makes this harder. Elie's father is becoming weaker by the day, requiring more effort on Elie's part to help him. But Elie finds it hard enough to look after himself, let alone anyone else, even his closest surviving relative.

So he becomes increasingly indifferent to his father's welfare, looking on impotently while he's savagely beaten to within an inch of his life by two SS guards. It gets to the point where Elie actually wishes that his father would die to put the both of them out of their misery. And when Elie's father finally does die, Elie can't even bring himself to cry. All he can think about at that moment is where his next meal's coming from.

Elie recognizes that he's become a different person due to his experiences in Auschwitz. Somewhat less than a man, he's been reduced to the status of an animal by the Nazis' systematic brutality and inhumanity.

Eliezer’s father got weaker, and he eventually fell ill while at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He suffered from a bout of dysentery until he succumbed from the effects of the disease and lack of treatment. Eliezer was not optimistic of his father’s survival because of the conditions in the camps. However, he did everything to keep his father comfortable. The reality that he was going to lose his father made him grow closer to him. Eliezer bribed his way into getting a cot next to his father because he wanted to be close to him. He always ensured that he stayed close to his father. He tried to get his father some medical attention, but his attempts were futile. Eliezer gave his father his ration of food, and he went hungry, all in attempts to buy his father more time. The Blockalteste noticed his predicament and tried to dissuade him from giving his food to his father. Eliezer continued to help his father despite the odds against him until he passed on.

When Eliezer Wiesel was freed from the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, he had nothing but the memories of his family, his home, and his country.  Everything had been taken from him in the Holocaust. Nightis the story of Ely Wiesel surviving Nazi concentration camps as a teenager. Interestingly, Wiesel waited ten years before he wrote about his survival; consequently, this is a memoir based on Wiesel’s reflections ten years after his nightmarish experiences.  

Eliezer is the main character in Night.  The reader follows his experiences as not only the protagonist by the narrator as well. His first person narration places the reader inside the camps with the young boy who is the only character in the story that survives the camp’s horror.

With the death of his mother and sister, Eliezer began to have doubts that God existed, and his faith decreases when he was taken to the concentration camp. He could not understand nor believe how God could let something so horrible happen to him and his family.

Everywhere the boy looked there were dead bodies.  Where was God in this terrible place?  These corpses symbolize to Elie a spiritual death.

When the camps are liberated, Eliezer looks at himself for the first time in many months. He sees a corpse in the mirror. The look in his eyes as he stares at himself never leaves him. It speaks of the horror he has experienced and seen which stole his childhood innocence and his faith in God’s mercy and justice.

When Ely’s father is dying, he searches for someone to help him.  One of the guards tells Elie  that there is no one to help:

In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others.  Not eveyone is your father. In this place, there is no such as father, brother, friend.  Each of us lives and dies alone. 

Elie’s observation of his father dying is too much for the teenager.  He gets in his bunk above his father and sleeps.  When he awakens the next morning, his father has already been taken to the crematorium.  He was unable to cry for him. The father that he loved and admired was gone, yet, he had the feeling of relief: both he and his father were free at last. 

After the death of his father, he became completely idle. His only mission was to eat to survive.  He no longer even thought of his mother or father, only of his survival.  He had lost his way; and he only felt numbness.  This was the way it was even when the camp was liberated.   

However, the human spirit has the ability to rise again.  After he gained his freedom, Wiesel knew that he had to devote his life to the cause of human rights.  He decided to speak for those who had no voice and for those who suffered from injustice.  That is what this young boy did with his life.  Elie Wiesel became the man of which his father would be proud. 

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the relationship between Elie and his father is characterized as a bit contentious before the family is sent to the concentration camps. Elie wants to go deeper into the study of Jewish mysticism with a man called Moshe the Beadle. His father, however, believes he is too young for such advanced religious pursuits.

Once they are imprisoned and under the constant threat of the crematories, their relationship changes. They go to great lengths to avoid being separated, and their only comfort is the presence of the other. Elie’s father performs numerous small kindnesses for him, such as giving Elie part of his own rations.

However, the dehumanizing pressure of Nazi persecution eventually causes cracks in the relationship. At one point, Elie’s father is beaten for questioning an authority figure. Elie, instead of sympathizing with his father, feels anger toward him for getting himself into trouble in the first place.

Near the end of the book Elie’s father is dying of dysentery. As his health declines, Elie begins to feel that he is becoming a burden and a threat to his own survival. When he finally sees one day that his father is gone, presumably to the crematorium, he cannot help but think, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, that he is finally free of his father.

Part of the value of the story is Wiesel’s brutal honesty. He shines as much light on his own weaknesses as he does on the cruelty of the Nazis. His feelings toward his father communicate that weakness, and the frailty of the human heart, in a way that readers will remember. 

Elie begins the novel as a devout Jew, studying the Torah and hoping to study the Kabbalah when he's considered mature enough to do so. He believes in a benevolent God, but this changes when he is forced into the concentration camp. He wonders why a good God would permit such suffering, especially upon decent human beings. Elie does not necessarily become an atheist since he still thinks that God exists, but he does doubt that God is good or just as a result of his traumatic experiences.

His relationship with his father changes as well. Initially, he views his father as a strong figure, his protector and guide. However, in the camp, Elie's father is weakened and Elie must then protect him. Elie does not always succeed in this duty, at one point not answering his delirious, suffering father when he cries out in the night for fear that the guards will kill him.

In this way, Elie loses two father figures as a result of his time in the death camps.

In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie's relationship with God and with his father change considerably throughout the book. In the beginning Elie spends as much time as he can studying Judaism and particularly the Cabbala--Jewish mysticism. He has a very strong belief in God, so strong as a matter of fact, that he cries when he prays. After Elie and his family and neighbors from his hometown of Sighet are captured by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz, Elie's belief changes. He does not understand how any God could let such horrors happen to his people. The God he thought he knew so well has become a stranger to Elie. Eventually, he loses all belief in God. 

Elie's relationship with his father also changes. In the beginning, he is the child who loves, respects and depends on his father. His father is his protector, and the one expected to stay strong. Soon though, their roles are reversed. Elie finds himself in the position of protector to his father. He teaches his father to march, so that the kapos won't pick on him. Elie worries about whether his father is getting enough to eat. He sticks by his father and encourages him to keep marching even when his father wants to give up. Elie becomes the parent, and his father becomes the child. 

Early in Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is his father's child. His one goal is not to be separated from his father as they arrive at Birkenau and later at Buna. Elie is only fourteen years old when he and the rest of the Jews of Sighet are taken from their homes. When Elie's father asks to go to the bathroom and is savagely hit by one of the Kapos, Elie is ashamed of himself for not defending his father, but his father whispers to him that it is ok; he says "It doesn't hurt" to alleviate his son's guilt. Elie's father also assures him that his mother and sisters are probably alright even though they both know this is unlikely.

As the book continues, Elie watches his father age before his eyes and begin to lose hope. Elie takes over the role of caretaker. When the prisoners are forced to leave Buna because the Red Army is coming, the Nazis make them run. Elie thinks about giving up and letting death take him.

"My father's presence was the only thing that stopped me.... He was running at my side, out of breath, at the end of his strength, at his wit's end.  I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his only support." (Wiesel 82)

Toward the end, as Elie's father lay dying, Elie shares his soup with him, but dysentery kills his dad anyway. Elie is filled with guilt for not doing more even though there was nothing more he could have done.