I don't think Wiesel is trying to tell a single lesson through book. Furthermore, I think different readers are going to pull different main lessons from it depending on their perspectives. One lesson that I think is immediately understood by many readers is that the Holocaust was awful, and the prison camps were basically hell on Earth. Wiesel's account is unflinchingly graphic, and readers are meant to be disgusted with the treatment that these prisoners had to endure. Tied closely with those conditions is a lesson about the dehumanizing result of the camps. The guards didn't treat the prisoners like real people, and the prisoners themselves stopped seeing each other as fellow humans. In fact, the men and women even stopped seeing family members as people to love and care for. Readers see this when Eliezer feels that his father is a threat to his own survival. His father is now a burden instead of a blessing. The dehumanization of Eliezer and the others results in a complete loss of identity. They simply care about self-preservation. Any kind of faith, human dignity, and spirit has been completely driven out of them, and that's a tough lesson to learn about.
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