During the years prior to Elie's Wiesel's experience in the Holocaust, Elie and his father shared a distant relationship that lacked a tremendous amount of support and communications but, eventually, their bond strengthens as they rely on each other for survival and comfort.
Elie Wiesel's description of the relationship he shared with his father, Shlomo, prior to the Holocaust, shows that it is distant and lacks the chemistry a father and son usually possess. Elie retells that his father did not show signs of encouragement when he wanted to study the Kabbalah: "You are too young for that. Maimonides tells us that one must be thirty before venturing into the world of mysticism, a world fraught with peril. First you must study the basic
Elie is becoming selfish: "Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu's son has done" (91). After witnessing Rabbi Eliahu's being left behind by his own son, Elie concludes that he will not leave his father behind and he does not. There is an instance that Elie left his father alone during a commotion but he regrets it and goes back to look for his father. Elie understands that his father is becoming a burden to him: "I gave him what was left of my soup. But my heart was heavy. I was aware that I was doing it grudgingly. Just like Rabbi Eliahu's son, I had not passed the test" (107). Although Elie gave his father his soup reluctantly, his actions show that he does care for his father's survival. Elie shows hos indifferent he feels towards his father's death, as opposed to how hopeless he felt when he thought his father was dead: "I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!..." Elie is not entirely indifferent because he truly wants to grieve over his father's death, however, his father's death would mean freedom for his own