Luke -Blog Post #2

In Night there are many different themes that are important. One big theme is luck. Some people think luck is good; however in this book there are places where luck hurts Elie, but there are places where it saves his life. A good example of when luck saves his life is when a man comes up to him and tells him to fake his age and his father's age.

“‘Hey kid, how old are you?’

The man interrogating me was an inmate. I could not see his face, but his voice was weary and warm.

‘Fifteen.’

‘No. You’re eighteen.’

‘But I’m not,’ I said ‘I’m fifteen.’

‘Fool. Listen to what I say.’

Then he asked my father, who answered:

‘I’m fifty.’

‘No.’ The man now sounded angry. ‘Not fifty. You’re forty. Do you hear? Eighteen and forty.’” (30)

Here Elie and his father are just entering the camp and before getting asked their age, this man tells them to change it. Elie doesn’t know this yet, but if they had said that they are fifteen and forty they would have been deemed not fit enough to work. Elie and his father are very lucky that this man told them this or else they probably would have died soon after.

A place where Elie has bad luck is when he goes to the doctor and the war is all but over. He has two options, either to stay and get killed by the germans, or to walk the long walk with everyone else. He chooses to walk and not stay.

“The news made us wonder. Were the SS really going to leave hundreds of prisoners behind in the infirmaries, pending the arrival of their liberators? Were they really going to allow Jews to hear the clock strike twelve? Of course not.

‘All the patients will be finished off on the spot,’ said the faceless one.” (81)

Elie decides to fight thru the pain and walk in the freezing cold instead of what he thinks is being murdered in the infirmary. However he later finds out that the people in the infirmary were liberated by the Russians. This is bad luck for Elie because even though he did not die he went thru all of that pain in the snow just to survive, but he could've just stayed in the infirmary and lived much easier. The luck here that Elie has is very unlucky, however everyone gets bad luck at some points in their life. Bad luck happens to me all the time when I play sports. It's no where close to the bad luck Elie gets, but it is still bad luck. For me, it goes from unlucky calls playing baseball to the ball hitting of my glove playing soccer.