In the autobiographical story Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is taken to a Nazi concentration camp and imprisoned there with many other Jewish men. They all remain at the camp until the war draws near its close. Knowing that the Allies are closing in, the Nazis force the residents of the camp to relocate to a nearby camp that is further from the front. They have the men run through a winter's night in the grueling cold after they have been starved, beaten, and tortured.
Zalman is one of Elie's fellow prisoners in the camp, who is unable to endure the torment of the run. He begins feeling sick with stomach cramps during their journey and is unable to go on, in spite of Wiesel urging him to continue. The man crouches down and is quickly knocked over and trampled to death by the crowd of prisoners. His death shows the cruelty and depravity of the Nazi soldiers, as well as how broken the Jewish prisoners had become. None of the men even stopped or parted to prevent Zalman's injury for fear of their own life. They had been so stripped of their humanity that trampling another person was nothing to them at the time.
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Zalman is another prisoner at the camp. Late in the story, the men are forced to relocate to a different concentration camp due to the progress of the Allied soldiers, a deadly march they undertake in the middle of the night, very abruptly. During this march through the night, in which all the men are obviously horribly malnourished and weak, yet are still forced to march hours and miles through the night, Zalman begins to have severe stomach cramps. When he stops to try and recover, Elie tries to make him get up because he knows the Nazis will kill him for stopping. Because of his pain Zalman is unable to continue, but he is trampled by all the other men who refuse to stop out of fear.
This scene shows the cruelty of the German soldiers, as well as the pervasive fear of the prisoners. The Nazis were cold and cruel, willing to kill anyone at a moment’s notice. Perhaps worse is the fear the prisoners feel, a fear that drives them to pressing onward in spite of their own pain or the fact that they’re literally trampling a friend of theirs to death.
Zalman is one of Elie's fellow prisoners in the camp. One night, the Germans take the prisoners on a grueling forced march. During the march, Zalman gets sick with stomach cramps. He feels so bad that he says he can't go on much longer. Elie tries desperately to get him to keep moving; if he stops then it's almost certain that the Germans will kill him. But the Germans don't need to anyway, because after Zalman squats to the ground, the other prisoners, terrified of what will happen to them if they stop, trample him to death.
What's important about this episode is that it shows us the fanatical will to live that so many of the prisoners have. They're so fixated on their brutal struggle for existence that they kill one of their own, albeit inadvertently. The exhausting forced march that they endure that night is a metaphor for their experiences in the camp. Every day is a fight for survival and the only way they stand a chance of making it through their ordeal is to keep moving on, no matter how punishing or physically degrading. Zalman is unable to do this, and his tragic fate acts as a reminder of what happens to those no longer fit to survive in such a merciless environment.
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