The letters and documents that we have are all during the Holocaust, but rarely do we have a Jewish persons take on what happened to the moments leading up to it. .
While they are in cattle cars and being transported Elizer recalls how a woman was affected by the torture she had been through thus far. In the cattle car there was barely room to move, very little air to breathe, and the fear how having no idea what is going to happen next. A woman named Mrs. Schachter had, by his description, lost her mind. His vivid descriptions of how she was seeing fire outside of the car, how she was hallucinating before of how thirsty she was. She began to irritate the other Jews and they even began beating her. "Keep her quite! Make that madwoman shut up. She's not the only one here" (Wiesel 26). These are little details that photographs can't give us. Most people who learn about the Holocaust never get to hear the side on how other Jews got angry and frustrated with other Jews. His novel lets the readers know not only how he was affected, physically and mentally, by the torture they went through, but he also gives us examples of people he saw first hand. It's unlikely they people who are writing letters from the Holocaust are going to write about a crazy woman in their cattle car. A historian now knows how Jews felt about other Jews, opposed to how they felt about the Germans. .
Another big reason I think we get more emotion details on the life of someone going through the Holocaust in Night is the story that we see developing with himself and his father. From the very beginning of the novel we get a sense of how important it is for both his father and himself to stay together. There were many people through the Holocaust who started with a loved one and eventually got separated. The relationship he had with his father had been crucial, I think, to both of them fighting to stay alive. In a way they were each other's motivation to fight through it and not give up.
