At the end of Night Elie Wiesel was in the hospital for food poisoning after the liberation of the camp Buchenwald. He looked in a mirror for the first time since he had lived in the ghetto just before he and his family were forced to leave for Auschwitz. Wiesel said "from the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me". Although he was physically free and alive his spirit and soul were still trapped and surrounded by the terrible memories that would never allow a peaceful life. Wiesel's spirit was the corpse gazing back at him.
Elie Wiesel's spirit began to deteriorate the moment he was separated from his mother and sister at Birkenau, the reception center for Auschwitz. Since Wiesel was only fifteen years of age at the time, it must have been a great devastation to him for not only being in the terrible place where he was, but for also seeing his mother and younger sister for the last time. .
Wiesel did everything possible to remain with his father as they were moved from camp to camp. Without his father, Elie would surely have died in the camps. He lived for his father. When he saw the instances where a son was beating his father for a ration of bread on a train, and where another son was running ahead of his father and knew this yet he kept running anyway, Wiesel began to think to himself how a son can do such a thing. This had hurt his spirit even more. Through this he began to feel guilty, especially when he had a heavy heart giving half of his portion of bread to his father who was very ill.
One of the main things contributing to the death of Wiesel's spirit was when he witnessed the hanging of the pipel at Buna. The pipel was only a young boy of thirteen and they were to hang him. Since he was light in weight when the chairs were tipped over, he was still alive struggling for a half hour. Wiesel said God was hanging there on this gallows, he had lost his faith. He lamented over all of this and said that "that night the soup tasted of corpses".
