Throughout his memoirs, Wiesel describes the treatment both he and his people experienced. He retells of the torture, the starvation, the beatings and the death which surround them all and the effect it has on them. He describes how good people, people he himself knew previously, or had come to know in his time at the concentration camps, succumbed to the treatment they experienced and begin to turn on one another, himself included.
I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet . . . any anger I felt at the moment was directed, not against the Kapo but against my father. I was angry at him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak. This is what concentration camp had made of me.
He describes how people are willing to murder for a single piece of bread , be shot for a bowl of soup and how they willingly helped the Nazi’s dispose of dead bodies, where “Sons abandoned their father’s remains without a tear.”
A shell of his former self, Wiesel describes how when he had lost location of his father for a time his heart prayed “Don’t let me find him! If only I could rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all of my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself.” Though he and his father had drew strength from one another throughout the beginning of their ordeal, Wiesel himself succumbs to the thinking of most who surround him; “Here, ever man has to fight for himself and not think of anyone else. Even of his father. Here, there are