"The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it." Elie himself was aware that he had changed from the young innocent boy whose dream was to study the Cabbala, but after his many trials and sufferings recounted throughout `Night', he had changed into a hardened, embittered young man who "did not deny God's existence, but [he] doubted his absolute justice."

Elie, before the war, was portrayed as a deeply religious young boy for his community and his family were everything, yet by the end of his internment, Elie had experienced "the death of his God and his soul." The experiences that Elie encountered...