Eliezer, like the other prisoners, experiences the shock of being thrust into the savagery of Auschwitz, and the principal change within him is the questioning of his religious faith. He hears men reciting Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, but asks himself,
I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.
The opening line of the prayer is "May his name be celebrated and sanctified." Eliezer, having just seen babies thrown into the crematorium, questions why men should so honor God, in light of the atrocities he is now witnessing.
The fact that the opening chapter of Night focuses on Eliezer's religious education shows how important Judaism was in the young boy's life. Even before the arrival at Auschwitz, his sense of God begins to be shaken, but he is simultaneously prescient enough to see the events as a kind of reenactment of Jewish history, of the centuries of persecution. As the Jews are being exiled from Sighet, the scene appears
like a page torn from a book, a historical novel, dealing with the captivity in Babylon or the Spanish Inquisition.
It is surreal that this is occurring in the twentieth century. As Eliezer's thinking is transformed from naive faith to a questioning of God's very existence, however, what remains unchanged is the continuity of the Jewish experience as it has been through the centuries.
Chapter 3 includes the story of Elie and his father coming to Auschwitz. It is a horrific scene, and Elie is transformed by what he sees, in particular the sight of a truck load of the bodies of dead children being dumped into a fire.
While Elie is outraged, he also loses his will to protect his father or to stand up to his captors in anyway. This shocks him. There is a moment when his father is struck in the face by a guard and falls to the ground, and Elie realizes that he has no reaction to this injustice: he can tolerate his father's assault because he has learned in his short time at the camp that his survival depends on not attracting notice to himself, even if that means not standing up for his loved ones.
While Elie’s development is multifaceted, he changes on two major fronts in chapter three. One is his attitude toward God. In the beginning of the story, he is a devout Jew to whom praying is as natural as breathing. However, early on in chapter three, he witnesses the burning of babies in a crematorium. This alters his attitude toward God:
For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?
Elie begins to see God as fickle, leaving him and other innocent people to die in such horrible ways. In essence, he loses faith and begins to trust in himself for survival, rather than a being whose presence he cannot sense. His loss of hope is continually emphasized, as in the following passage:
The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me.
The reader notices a second major change when his father is beaten before his very eyes. At the start, Elie worries continually about his father and desires to be near him no matter the cost. When he witnesses the beating, however, his attitude shifts noticeably. Elie himself takes note of the change in himself. After his father is hit, he reflects:
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.
Elie realizes that he has become more concerned with his own well-being than his father’s. Where before he would have fought for his father, now he keeps to himself to avoid a similar beating. His instinct of self-preservation has taken hold.
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