<u>The 'run' and Elie's experience during the death march:</u>
Ellie has a harrowing experience during the run and the death march in which he witnesses inhumanity, brutality, and meanness at their height and prays to God that he never does what he had seen a son doing to his father.
Night is a book that depicts the time and conditions during the Holocaust when the Jewish people were brutally treated in the Nazi Germany Concentration Camps.
Death march was the movement of Jewish prisoners from one concentration camp to another. During the ‘run’ in which they ran for more than forty miles, Ellie Wiesel saw a father and son duo who were running along with them and other prisoners.
He saw how the son when he saw the father losing strength, ran past him as he had started believing that his poor, old, malnourished and exhausted father would not be able to make it. The only punishment that the incapable runners would get was a gunshot that relieved them of their miseries. The son left his father in lurch running ahead to save his own life. Though Ellie knew this truth, he did not reveal it to the old father who was still looking for his son, ignorant of the selfishness of his son.
Ellie who was with his ailing father lay exhausted in a shed after the run and prayed that he does not repeat the actions of the inhuman son and do to his own father what he saw the son doing to the poor old Rabbi father.
A boy running beside Ellie feels he cannot do anymore and gives up. He is trampled to death. He also saw a musician and his violin trampled to death.
When they are loaded in cattle cars for transporting them to another camp, one of the strongest men, who had saved Ellie from dying due to strangulation in the car, dies of exhaustion and starvation. Only 12 out of a hundred survived when they reached the destination.
He also witnessed the sadism of German locals who threw insufficient food to start fights and killings over bread.
