Basic Human Rights In Night By Elie Wiesel

“Ideas about human rights have evolved over many centuries. But they achieved strong international support following the Holocaust and World War II. To protect future generations from a repeat of these horrors, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 and invited states to sign and ratify it”

Imagine, people at your feet, doing everything you ask, raising you higher and better than everyone else. Does it feel good to live a life of luxury? Some would give up everything they have to achieve this fantasy, and the ones who finally have it never let it go. This is what it is like to have power and most abuse it. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, it follows a young boy named Elie, through a tragic event called the holocaust. Through so many traumatizing moments of fear and helplessness gives the ongoing theme of power, or the abuse of power. Power is something that an individual gains by asserting authority over others and can influence what they do or what happens. In this case many people that took part in the holocaust abused their power to accomplish extreme genocide. The abuse of power originated from Hitler, onto the people who ran the concentration camps, and to the people directly looking over the mistreated Jews.

The transportation from camp to camp was a horrible experience for Elie. The prisoners were treated with absolutely no respect and piled into train cars with up to a hundred prisoners per car while being transported to Buchenwald. While on the train to Buchenwald Elie states, “We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies” (Elie Wiesel 100). One could not begin to imagine the cruel abuse that these prisoners went through. Snow continuously fell as they stacked on top of each other for any sign of warmth. Elie made a powerful declaration when he calls himself along with the other prisoners

The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them under the most extreme conditions.

When looking through the history of humanity, an alarming pattern begins to emerge: the pattern of oppression. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have constantly sought to oppress one-another and establish superiority over another group of people. In the book Nights, Elie Wiesel details his petrifying experience of oppression in Nazi Concentration camps, perpetrated by the Nazi Regime and its collaborators. What happened to Wiesel and the rest of Europe’s Jews was a hate crime like the world had never seen before. But where exactly could so much “evil” come from?

In Night, memoirist Elie Wiesel shares his most personal memories of the Holocaust, which he experienced directly and during which he lost his family and many friends. On page eight, Wiesel accounts for the lack of initiative adults in his community took to protect themselves and their families against the Nazis. He states that they concerned themselves with “strategy, diplomacy, politics, and Zionism—but not with their own fate.” Elie Wiesel describes these distractions with resentment, and rightfully so. In Sighet, Wiesel shows many of the Jewish people downplaying the need to take action because they believe circumstances will improve. Wiesel believes that if the elders had taken precautions earlier on and prepared themselves, the tragedy

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, categories all human beings as free. Article one identify all human beings as born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article two states, Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust,

What would it do to a person to go to a concentration camp, see the horrible things, and come out alive? This book, Night, is about Eliezer Wiesel, who is both the main character and the author. Elie’s book is a memorial about his experience in Hitler’s concentration camps, what he went through, and how he survived. This paper is going to be about Eliezer’s horrific experience and the ways that it changed him.

Injustice brings anger and fear to everyone. It could cause someone to act unconsciously or hide to wait for an end. Injustice shapes our history, proven by the French Revolution, the Holocaust, and 9/11. Yet these events are history, what is the right way to respond and end injustice? Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and writer, wrote many forms of literacy including Night that shares his experiences and actions during the Holocaust and “We Choose Honor” an article that features 9/11 and the United States’s response to it. Similarly, Maurice Ogden’s poem “The Hangman” demonstrates the flaws that occur when a population refuses to confront authority or injustice. Wiesel argues that the right way to respond to an act of injustice is to work as a group with your peers to solve the situation. Wiesel is correct in his belief of solving injustice because humans, at their core, are social beings that are more likely to succeed helping each other, and a group of humans is more intimidating and have more power to overcome injustice.

Human rights were an achievement that we humans have been working for years. Therefore it came to effect for at least some of us around the world in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is a declaration of 30 human rights that the United Nation adopted in December 10 of 1948. However, we face challenges along the way that oppose this belief of human rights. Unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, a novel called Night which is about a man’s experience of the Holocaust (written by Elie Wiesel who actually experienced the event) provide events that violated the human rights of two, three, and five.

Abusement, we sometimes get this without even noticing it. You might wonder, how are we being abused? Well, there are 30 human rights written as articles, meaning that these are the rights that we get just for being humans. There are many television commercials, games and books about this violent topic, for example a simple and small in size novel by the title of Night written by Elie Wiesel. In this novel, there are three major human rights that get violated according to the book there is nothing to get confused about… Human rights have been violated plenty of times in history, starting with freedom of discrimination, freedom from torture, and freedom of thought/ conscience and religion, (the major violation in Night)

In the story Night, Elie Wiesel recalls a moment in the past when he had seen his father get hit and he just “stood there petrified”(Wiesel 39). Inhumanity towards his father lead to change in character. Two themes lead by inhumanity are changes in character such as thoughts, beliefs, and feelings, the second theme is a loss of relationship towards family.

One reason human rights can’t be actualized for everyone is because power corrupts them. For example, in the book Night by Elie Wiesel the Jews are forced to leave their homes, “The Hungarian police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one” (Wiesel 22). This quote shows how these police who are serving Hitler are being ordered to move these Jews and imprison them. The police would not normally do this to Jews but because Hitler has the power and authority to force them to do this. This shows how he can easily make them take away their human rights simply because of Power. Another instance where power corrupts human rights is in the speech, “The Perils of Indifference” by Elie Wiesel, where the president it blamed by denying,

The theme of the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, is inhumanity and how the Nazis made the Jews in their concentration camps feel less that human. Elie is a young boy who gets taken near the end of World War 2 and moved throughout different concentration camps around Poland and Germany. This theme is developed throughout Elie’s travels to different concentration camps and seeing how he and other prisoners are treated. “Buna was a veritable hell. No water, no blankets, less soup and bread. At night, we slept almost naked and the temperature was thirty below. We were collection corpses by the hundreds every day” (Wiesel 70). Like the quote says, it was hell. They were treated like animals and never got anything they needed. Hundreds died everyday

Having human rights in place imposes certain obligations on the government and justifies the complaints of those whose rights and freedoms have not been respected. Everyone is entitled to human rights regardless of their nationality, gender, race, religion, or political opinion. The failure to recognize these rights results in conflict and a vicious cycle of violence as more human rights are violated. To avoid such clashes, human rights have become a fundamental part of global law and policy. However, they have not always been that way. Catastrophic events in history that claimed thousands of lives ran their vicious course before it was recognized that there had to be human rights established. The most famous example of genocide is the Holocaust, which killed around six million Jews. After the Holocaust, the United Nations recognized that there had to be human rights put into place. Two human rights from the United Nations’ “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” that were perversely violated during the Holocaust are Article 5 (the protection against inhumane treatment or punishment) and Article 25 (the right to a standard of living.) Light is shed upon the exploitation of human rights during the Holocaust in both Night by Elie Wiesel and The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal. The Holocaust was a devastating event that opened our eyes to just how cruel humans can be, and why human rights must be enforced and protected.