Alike him, his fellow Jews were also persecuted and mistreated just because of their ethnicity. Living in a condition where they are starving and abused mentally and physically, this led out the darkest state of camp prisoners, as a guy advised Elie, “Listen to me kid, don’t forget that you’re in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you can not think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you a good advice: stop giving your ration to your father. You can not help him anymore.” (p.110) This exhibits how the feelings and affections of a human is no longer clear in them anymore but instead they manifest animalistic behaviors just in order to survive. Elie for a second took the guy’s advice but felt guilty since he said, “He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father… You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup… It was only a fraction of second but it left , me feeling guilty. I ran to get some soup and brought it to my father.” Despite the dark side of Elie surfacing out, he is still admirable despite the guilty thoughts he had for his father since he still nurses and supports …show more content…
He notices himself holding back from defending his father for the fear of being mistreated too when he stated, “He slapped my father with such a force that he fell down and then crawled back to his place on all fours. I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal 's flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this.” (p.39) As his father becomes older, he becomes weaker too. From here, Elie starts to be aware that his father is beginning to be a load hindering his chance of surviving. And when his father died he said, “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!” (p.112) Because of the suffering both emotionally and physically he has endured from the start, he feels so exhausted that he can no longer feel normal human emotion, like grief or sadness. Elie feels that he’s simply a body only desiring to