Mary's "Night" Post #2

         One of these many details is how easy it is for Elie Wiesel to lie to the dentist and not have to deal with any immediate consequences. For instance, when the dentist tells him he's going to remove Wiesel's gold crown, Elie blatantly lies saying, "Couldn't you wait a few days sir? I don't feel well, I have a fever" (52). And before the dentist can call him back to remove his crown, he is hung and Wiesel is allowed to keep his crown for a while, even though he ends up having it taken from him eventually.
         The two hangings that I read about in this section shocked me because I had never even realized that two events, carried out the exact same way, could turn out so differently. The first hanging, the one in which a man had been condemned to die for stealing a ration of soup left unattended, was almost inspiring. The way he defied everything around him for a bowl of soup! And his last words, they almost remind me of the Declaration of Independence in the way that they must have sounded that day, "Long live liberty!" (62). It must have given the other prisoners something to hope for because that night, "...the soup tasted better than ever" (63), on that night, I'm sure the soup tasted like the hope for a second chance at surviving. Sadly, this was quickly buffeted by the storms of a death that should never be, the long, slow, agonizing, and cruel death of a child who does not even way enough to end his own suffering or cry out his defiance before his people, his faith, and himself. The soup was right to taste like corpses that night because what those people witnessed was something dearly akin to God hanging on the gallows, struggling to end the suffering.
         I can only hope that Wiesel does not kick himself over the decision to leave the camp with the evacuation. He had know way of knowing how close liberation was and like the others around him, he was expecting only the worst, which is completely logical and reasonable.