Jealousy

What the concentration camps did to people was beyond appalling. The intention of concentration camps, as we have discussed, was to reduce the inmates to nothing more than animals, with the purpose of making them into the "other." As The Shawl and Night illustrate, the effectiveness of such a strategy was massive. Father and son are turned against each other, battling to death over a crust of bread. In The Shawl, as a pitiful explanation for stealing Magda's shawl and resulting in Magda's horrible death, Stella merely says, "I was cold." (3) In the concentration camps, nothing matters except food and shelter, the basic animalistic needs. Loyalty, morality, and basic decency are too often the first things to perish in such a crisis. Such a reaction is evolutionary in origin; in times of struggle, the ones that survive are the ones that do whatever it takes. This could explain in part why, in Night, it always seems to be the sons attacking the fathers rather than vice versa; from an evolutionary perspective, fathers wouldn't want to take out their own flesh and blood; sons would have no such issue. The Nazis used the brutalness of "Survival of the Fittest" to their advantage; no one was willing to stand up in the name of liberty and justice, and very few were willing to stick their necks out for anyone. As a result, the Nazis literally starved the Jews into submission.