1. By Lindsey Purves<br />Choice & Chance<br />Night Essay<br />Choice and chance play a huge role in Eliezer’s survival of the Holocaust. He makes choices which allow him to escape horrible fates at the concentration camps. Chance is the biggest deciding factor in allowing Elie to live through those torturous months of his time in the camps, and being freed from Buchenwald. I believe chance and choice directly influence each other and therefore we can ultimately control our own lives to a great extent.<br />Upon arriving at Birkenau all Jews were split into male and female groups, and asked their age. Elie chose to take one of the prisoner’s advice to give a fake age, which allowed him to escape being sent to the furnace or killed in some other manner because of his “useless” young age. “I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing.” I believe Elie made this choice to protect himself, for if he had come to his father’s aid he may have suffered a similar punishment or made the situation worse for him and his father.<br />Chance plays a huge role in keeping Elie with his father till the end. Through chance they are put into the same Blocks in most of the camps, and when they are not they are never sent to different concentration camps than the other. In one of the camps Eliezer and his father lived in they were assigned to a Block under a Jewish man who looked out for his Block. “Whenever he could, he would organize a cauldron of soup for the young ones, the weak, all those who were dreaming more about an extra plateful than of liberty.” On April 10, 1945 American troops reached Buchenwald, the concentration camp Elie and his recently deceased father lived in. This was the biggest chance occurrence that saved Elie from joining the many others who fell within the Holocaust camps.<br />Chance can open opportunities to make choices; choices can create chances which allow things to happen that would not otherwise occur. In every circumstance there will be a choice to make, whether it be from a chance occurrence or something we choose to do that is completely of our own accord. Our lives can be directed by the choices we make and in turn give us great power in the control of our lives.<br />Chance allowed Eliezer to escape the Holocaust alive and provided him with reliefs from the horrors of the concentration camps. The choices Elie made allowed him to escape death and beatings alike. All of the choices Elie made allowed him to live, some brought on by chance like when some of the higher-ups in the camps would offer a word of advice, helping make hard decisions about how to handle particularly difficult situations.<br />