es driven by hate. They are both victims and it is here that they discover their own similarities. The beggar later tells Elisha that he has now discovered his own identity.These events all occur over fairly short periods of time. Night takes place over only 5 years, and Dawn mostly over the span of a single night. Yet the message both stories bring to the reader, lasts a lifetime. Night and Dawn both carry very similar and comparable themes. One of these includes how atrocities and cruel treatment can make good people into brutes and how one escapes or deals with this fate. In Night the victims of the Holocaust are dealing with the constant struggle for survival. The conditions are so harsh that it becomes almost impossible to care for anyone but yourself. When Elisha first comes to a concentration camp he vows to stand by his father because he is all that he has left in the world. Yet, as time moves on and death moves closer, Eliezer’s views change. When his father is on his death bed, Eliezer continues to feed him when he could be eating the food himself. At one point he thinks to himself, “’If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself.’ Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever.”(111) Yet, his father does die, despite the endless effort that Eliezer puts forth to bring him back to health.“I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like-free at last!”(116)This shows the affect that one’s surrounding and conditions have on your character. In Night it is the cruelty of the Germans that arises cruelty in their victims. Dawn also shows this when Elisha is forced to become a murderer. He has no hate for the man ...
