Remembering that Elie Wiesel is actually a Holocaust
survivor, and that the story is his own, he is writing from his own experiences and
beliefs. Desire for revenge was not one of the emotions he felt, or at least not
immediately.
Consider all of the energy and emotion Eliezer
had expended simply to survive, just to get to that point at the end where liberation
was even possible. It may well be that he simply wasn't capable of rage or revenge at
that point. Furthermore, consider all that had been lost by him in the Holocaust and
the camps by early 1945 when the story ends: most of his family, his confidence, his
identity, his health, his psyche. So much was lost by him, and every other survivor of
the Holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, that they had to be in severe psychological,
emotional and physical shock by the end of it.
Somewhere,
in wading through the complex maze of emotions associated with such a horrible,
sustained trauma, I'm sure there was a desire for revenge. But that stage of his
mourning just hadn't had the chance to develop yet, at least, by the end of the
book.
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