Elie Wiesel, in Night, his story of his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp, paints a picture of such horror that he ends his book seeing himself as a living corpse. The thesis of this study is that Wiesel's book only tells part of the story of the death camp survivors. Other sources will show the rest of the story. In fact, Wiesel himself has become a spokesperson for survivors and has shown that there is, indeed, life after the death camps.
Wiesel was a teenager in the Nazi death camps. He was in several of the camps, lost his family, and finally was rescued by Allied soldiers. Even after being rescued, Wiesel almost died after being accidentally poisoned by bad food:
I was transferred to the hospital and spent two weeks between life and death. One day I was able to get up, after gathering all my strength. I wanted to see myself in the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me (109).
Some might think that Wiesel would want to forget what happened to him in the death camps. Wiesel, however, knows that he and the world must never forget what happened. He will remember in honor to those who died there, and he will remember so that it will not happen again. Or at least that is what survivors would hope. The truth is that the same thing---on a smaller scale---is happening in the former Yugoslavia today. Perhaps if it weren't for the Nazi death camps we would not even be taking notice of the Bosnian camps and things would be much worse there than they are.
In any case, the story Wiesel tells is a horrible one. Human beings are tortured in many ways until they are reduced to the state of animals. The Nazis are shown to be creatures who are capable of every cruelty. The Jews and others in the camps have everything taken from then until in the end all they care ab...