Struggle to Survive

“Years later, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Our ship’s passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the ‘natives,’ who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady: ‘Please, don’t throw any more coins!’ ‘Why not?’ said she. ‘I like to give charity…’

In the wagon where the bread had landed, a battle had ensued. Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes. An extraordinary vitality possessed them, sharpening their teeth and nails.” (100-101)

Wiesel creates a parallel between his postwar experience in Aden and his experience on a train transporting starving men from one Nazi concentration camp to the next. By juxtaposing the two moments, Wiesel portrays how extreme a desperate person’s actions can be. The Parisian lady holds the notion that her actions are a form of “charity,” but instead they bring about extra struggling for the desperate children. Wiesel portrays the irony of the situation by clearly describing the children’s actions of “fighting” and “strangling.” Hardship has the power to break friendships and relationships. Suffering can even drive human beings to commit actions that they vow to never commit. Even Wiesel contemplates a couple of times abandoning his father and trying to focus his efforts on saving himself. Wiesel’s struggles as well as the hardships of many Jews during the Holocaust bring out the animalistic and selfish qualities of human nature that emerge during struggles for survival.

In the second instance, in the train car, the men are in the position of the children, and the German worker throwing bread is in the same position as the Parisian lady. The Nazis have impoverished the Jewish people to such a great extent that the animalistic quality of human nature takes over, and all social ideals have gone out the window. Wiesel describes the Jews as “beasts of prey” that were “mauling” each other with sharpened “teeth and nails.” All of Wiesel’s descriptive language creates the image of a carnivorous and ferocious beast like a lion or tiger. The men possess an “extraordinary vitality.” Essentially, in situations of life or death, human beings will almost always do whatever it takes to survive and beat their competition.