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“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”
! Eliezerʼs terse explanation of the atrocities he witnessed shows that that night was the beginning of the perpetual decline of his morality. This loss of morality, or at least morphing of morality, the sense of what is always righteous and always sinful, was altered to a situational based spectrum. The notion that using lesser evil to fight greater evil is justified, i.e. performing whatever is necessary to survive in order to rebel against the Genocide. This was what allowed Eliezer, and ultimately the fellow survivors of the holocaust, to go on. These survivors may have not “survived” in spirit, or morality, but due to their innate human instincts of survival, they were allowed to live on, after they abandoned the one thing that still made them human.