Survival Instinct vs. Empathy in Elie Wiesel's Night
This essay examines how the extreme conditions of Nazi concentration camps during World War II stripped prisoners of their capacity for empathy, love, and moral reasoning, replacing these human qualities with a raw instinct to survive. Drawing primarily on Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, as well as Tadeusz Borowski's This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen and survivor testimonies, the paper argues that behaviors once considered unthinkable — including sons abandoning fathers and prisoners fighting over scraps of bread — were the inevitable result of dehumanizing conditions, not failures of moral character. The essay situates these experiences within the broader context of survival guilt and Darwinian survival instinct theory.
- The Dehumanizing Gates of the Concentration Camps: Nazis stripped prisoners of dignity from arrival
- Survival Guilt and the Psychological Aftermath: Survivors haunted by guilt over self-preservation choices
- The Erosion of Family Bonds Under Extreme Conditions: Camp conditions eroded natural family loyalty and love
- Bread, Brutality, and the Beast Within: Scarcity drove prisoners to violence and betrayal
- Living and Dying Alone: The Final Stripping of Humanity: Wiesel's shame as his father became a survival burden
- Conclusion: Understanding the Survival Instinct: Survival instinct, not moral failure, explains prisoner behavior
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay grounds its argument in direct textual evidence from Wiesel's Night, using precise page citations to support each claim about the erosion of empathy, making the analysis concrete and credible.
- It balances literary analysis with psychological and historical context, drawing on survivor testimonies and Darwin's theory of survival instinct to show that inhumane behavior under extreme duress reflects biology, not moral failure.
- The opening survivor quotation from Leo Schneiderman immediately establishes emotional stakes and authenticity, drawing the reader into the argument before the thesis is stated.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of multiple source types — memoir, survivor interviews, academic psychology, and literary nonfiction — to build a multi-layered argument. Rather than relying on a single text, the writer triangulates evidence across sources to show that Wiesel's experience was not isolated but representative of a broader psychological phenomenon documented by scholars and survivors alike.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a survivor quotation and biographical framing before presenting its thesis: that survival instinct replaced empathy among Holocaust prisoners. It then moves chronologically through Wiesel's experiences in Night, from his first day in camp through his father's death, illustrating the progressive erosion of empathy. Corroborating evidence from Borowski and Haas is woven in at key moments. The essay closes by contextualizing these behaviors within Darwin's framework and affirming the moral innocence of the survivors.
The Dehumanizing Gates of the Concentration Camps
"And then we got out of the train. And everything went so fast: left, right, right, left. Men separated from women. Children torn from the arms of mothers. The elderly chased like cattle. The sick, the disabled were handled like packs of garbage. They were thrown in a side together with broken suitcases, with boxes."
— Leo Schneiderman, Holocaust survivor
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.
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.
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