Central to the characterization of Elie is the rapid transformation of his personality from a loving, concerned son to a dispassionate survivor. After the gypsy-prisoner Kapo beats Elie's father to the ground for asking permission to go to the toilet, Elie is surprised at himself: he is incapable of making a move and saying anything in his father's defense. The reduction of his humanity to a selfish will to live creates remorse, a significant part of the dehumanization of internees, who learn to preserve their lives at any cost—even in the face of pain and humiliation inflicted on a parent. Still the tenderhearted boy who once wept while praying, Elie judges himself harshly: "Had I changed so much, then? So quickly?" Moving beyond feeling and sleeplessness to an unknown destination, he passes emblems of death's heads that warn internees not to touch the electric fence. The skull precipitates black humor: He says of the mocking placard, "Was there a single place here where you were not in danger of death?"
On the eighth day of prison life, Elie redeems his harsh self-castigation in a minor episode—the spur-of-the-moment lie he tells Stein of Antwerp, the husband of Mrs. Wiesel's niece Reizel. By extending a scrap of hope to Stein that Reizel and the little boys thrive in Antwerp and that they send regular letters to his mother, Elie temporarily relieves Stein's tension, which had begun two years earlier with his deportation. This stroke of grace suggests that Elie, still months from his fifteenth birthday, has acquired some of the maturity and compassion of his father and is capable of lifting himself out of apprehension and grief to bestow hope on a fellow sufferer. This quality in the narrator became a major factor in his receipt of the Nobel Prize, which hundreds of letter-writers supported with testimonials to his selfless character, generosity, and empathy for strangers whom fate had turned into victims.
