Survival Instinct vs. Empathy in Elie Wiesel's Night

The Dehumanizing Gates of the Concentration Camps

In a moment, lives changed forever. "Men to the left. Women to the right" (Wiesel, p. 29). Eight words, delivered in two swift sentences, separated families forever at the gates of the German concentration camps of World War II. The Nazis made no exceptions for crying mothers, old women, or disabled veterans — unless by "exception" one means being treated with exceptional cruelty rather than being shown any privilege or kindness. When we read the personal accounts of Holocaust survivors, the cruelty of the Nazis toward innocent men, women, and children is overwhelming; yet, we have come to equate Nazism with inhumanity, indignity, and utter terror as though the horror ended at the camp gates.

What many people do not understand is that the indignity inflicted by the Nazis did not stop at the gates of the camps. In fact, the survivors of the Holocaust had to endure treatment that made them walking corpses, draining the life from them — and yet, somehow, these individuals were able to go on. In order to do so, the victims endured not only terror at the hands of the Nazis, but a kind of personal terror as well. As the survival instinct took hold, prisoners oftentimes found themselves acting in cruel and inhumane ways toward their fellow prisoners and even toward their own family members.

Survival Guilt and the Psychological Aftermath

In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his experience in the concentration camps and the times when the survival instinct compelled him to act in ways he would never have imagined. The shame and guilt Wiesel felt as a result of surviving — and of watching his father die — caused him to refuse to speak about his experience for years after the war ended. Wiesel left the war with no faith in God, no faith in humanity, and a belief that perhaps suicide was his only remaining option (Aberbach, 1989, p. 111). His response was not abnormal; feelings of survival guilt haunted many survivors, as demonstrated by one woman who, years later, still felt the pain of failing to protect her little sister:

"I felt guilty for many years that maybe I should have run back and tried to get her with me or stay with her. Maybe I didn't do enough to stay together. Maybe I was too selfish about saving myself. You can excuse yourself and say if I had run back my fate would have been the same as hers. There is no logic to my feelings. But those words ring in my ears, 'If you're not going to eat, you're going to die.'" (Haas, 1995, p. 163).

Eventually, Wiesel was able to put his feelings into words. As with many other Holocaust survivors, time and a deeper understanding of Hitler's Final Solution helped him accept that the power of the survival instinct is innate and not reflective of moral character. Indeed, according to Charles Darwin, the survival instinct present in human beings reflects the drive to survive — not a desire to harm others (Bergman, n.d.).

The Erosion of Family Bonds Under Extreme Conditions

Wiesel's memoir brings the power of the survival instinct to life. As a fifteen-year-old navigating the camps alongside his father, his experiences reveal how painful it was to have not only his life taken away, but also his natural instinct to help and empathize with others — especially his own family. After only one day in the camp, Elie witnessed his father being brutally slapped by a guard after asking to use the restroom. Elie noted that a day earlier he "would have dug my nails into the criminal's flesh" (Wiesel, p. 35). Now, he had not even blinked. Sensing that he had changed, he felt deep remorse and vowed he would never forgive the Nazis for what they had done to him (p. 35).

If one day could have such a profound effect, the accumulation of days and cruelty only intensified the fear, indignity, and desperate need to survive. Elie began to see this transformation all around him. On a run through the cold snow, he watched a rabbi and his son — a pair he had long admired, as for three years they had always looked after each other. Yet something changed that day. During a brief rest, the rabbi panicked, fearing his son might have died. Elie could not bring himself to tell the rabbi the bitter truth: that the son had seen his father limping and, at that moment, had run faster, letting the distance between them grow. As heartbreaking as Elie found this, he could not help a similar thought crossing his own mind — if only he could shed his father, a burden, and free himself from the encumbrance (Wiesel, pp. 86–87). Even so, love had not fully left him; he prayed to the God he was no longer sure existed: "My God, Lord of the Universe, give me strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahou's son has done." (p. 87).

Conclusion: Understanding the Survival Instinct

Elie and the rabbi's son simply did not have the capacity to do what was right; instead, they followed the instinct to survive rather than the instinct to empathize. In the years that followed, people came to understand how this could occur between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. It is because of the courage, strength, and depth of Wiesel's recollection that we can comprehend just how devastating the conditions of the camps were — both physically and mentally — and why the survival instinct, rather than moral failure, explains what happened within them.

References

Aberbach, D. (1989). Creativity and the survivor: The struggle for mastery. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 16, 273–286.

Bergman, J., PhD. (n.d.). Darwinism and the Nazi race Holocaust. Retrieved April 20, 2010, from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2259552/posts

Borowski, T. (1976). On the way to the gas chamber. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Haas, A. (1995). Survivor guilt in Holocaust (Doctoral dissertation) (pp. 163–184).

Personal Histories [Interview of Leo Schneiderman, Holocaust survivor]. (n.d.). Retrieved from

Wiesel, E. (2006). Night. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.