Describe the relationship between Eliezer and his father using details from the book to support your description.

Eliezer's
initial description of his father is a neutral one: he seems to indicate that there is a
distance of sorts between himself and his father, but the boy is nevertheless respectful to him
and does not give any evidence of the (in our conventional view today) typical dynamic of at
least an undercurrent of conflict with him. There is nothing to suggest his father is anything
other than a basically good man, in spite of his reserved nature:

My father was a cultured man, rather unsentimental. He rarely displayed his feelings,
not even within his family, and was more involved with the welfare of others than with that of
his own kin. [p. 4, trans. Marion Wiesel]

One has to
acknowledge that in the European culture of that time, even if there was anything negative in
their father-son relationship, children generally did not express it openly; to do so was
considered unseemly and disrespectful. But Eliezer actually seems to have bonded more with
Moishe the Beadle than with his father; the latter attempts to dissuade him from his studies of
Kabbalah, which Moishe encourages. It is significant that Moishe is Eliezer's entry point into
the boy's chief interest, Jewish religious studies, but is also the only townsperson in Sighet
to warn the others that they are in danger, though at first no one believes him.

When Eliezer's group is deported from Sighet and arrives at Auschwitz, Eliezer now no
one but his father to bond with and to prevent his total isolation in the terror that surrounds
him. The men are separated from the women and Eliezer is never to see his mother and sister
again. From this point it does not matter if any disagreements or distance have existed between
father and son; such petty concerns, if there had been any to begin withwhich were barely even
hinted at in the first part of the narrativehave vanished in the face of the grim struggle for
survival. But it is precisely the issue of survival that ultimately causes Eliezer's alienation
and guilt. The horror within Eliezer is that he realizes his father has become a drain upon him.
Under these circumstances in which people are forced into an animal-like fight to remain alive,
even the closest familial connection is instinctively negated in the end, at least when one
honestly confronts the feeling inwardly. In the night, when his father had died and Eliezer
awakens to see that another sick man has replaced his father on his cot, Eliezer cannot even cry
for him:

.....it pained me that I could not weep. But I
was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble
conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last ! ....

Yet Eliezer's further recognition, on the final page, is that he has been emptied of
feeling and, in fact, of life. He has not only been severed from his father emotionally, but his
own human vitality has been destroyed as well, when, "from the depths of the mirror, a
corpse was contemplating me."