* Well, for starters, '''it's the Holocaust'''.
* [[RageAgainstTheHeavens Eliezer's spiritual fight with God as to why He is letting this happen.]] "Where is God?"
** [[GodIsDead ''"Here he is...he is here, dangling on the gallows."'']]
** Just the brutal description of the beautiful boy whom everyone loved slowly strangling to death in the noose over the course of an hour.
* "That night, the soup tasted of corpses."
** Doubles as NightmareFuel.
* You have to [[TheWoobie sympathize for Eliezer]], considering he's doing everything in his power to keep his dad alive despite the endless horrors of their ordeal. It gets worse when Shlomo suffers dysentery, which causes the other prisoners to start beating him.
** At one point, Eliezer is so tired and desperate that when he is separated from Shlomo, he briefly hopes that the old man has died so that he can worry only about himself, a [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone moment of weakness that adds yet another scar Eliezer would carry to the end of his days]].
---> ''"But at that same moment this thought came into my mind. Don't let me find him! If only I could get rid of this dead weight, so that I could use all my strength to struggle for my own survival, and only worry about myself. Immediately I felt ashamed of myself, ashamed forever."''
** Shlomo's death in a NoHoldsBarredBeatdown from an SS officer. His last words were Eliezer's name, ''which Eliezer was too afraid to respond to.''
* The kid who ''fought his own dad to death'' [[DisproportionateRetribution for a bit of bread]].
* Wiesel also wrote a story about him calling out to Tzipora, his younger sister who presumably perished in the gas chambers with the mother. Wiesel recalls watching her play, her calling her big brother to come play with her, and the day she was separated from him. Wiesel begs to play with Tzipora once more.
* This, just this:
--->All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again.
--->I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
* When Rabbi Eliahu is looking for his son, not knowing that his son has already abandoned him.
* The BittersweetEnding in which Eliezer survives, but stares into a mirror and discovers just how much the camps have dehumanized him.
-->''"From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me."''
* Ultimately, the whole story itself. No matter how its fictional elements may throw us off (Wiesel was honest about its fictional elements in real life), the writing and Wiesel's dehumanization in the book rings true alongside other accounts from the concentration camps.