Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

During the Holocaust, people in the Nazi’s custody were treated as less than human. According to “Jakob’s Story”, the Nazi’s gave their prisoners little food and only one meal a day. Jakob writes “we ate one meal a day and it consisted of soup with potato peels; scraps of food from the SS” (Blankitny, paragraph 17). Here one can see that the Nazi’s looked down upon their prisoners and treated them as less than

One of the many reasons why the jewish called them “DEATH CAMPS”. (living conditions, labor and executions)

Another way the Germans dehumanized the Jews was by taking away all of their belongings. Some of these items they could live without, but they definitely did not realize how much they took them for granted. Lastly, the Jews were given numbers instead of their names. As the novel claimed, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). This act of taking away the Jews names and replacing them with numbers is an inhumane act which is dehumanizing towards them. People do not realize that something as simple as a name can have so much meaning until it is taken away. Therefore, the Germans stripped the Jews of everything that resembled a past life, which was dehumanizing.

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.

Dehumanization is the act of taking one’s human qualities away from them, this can be done using voice and also using actions. During the time of the Holocaust, the Nazi’s used their power to abuse and dehumanize the Jewish people. They would beat and kill them, they would yell at them and they stripped the Jews of their dignity and rights. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, one recurring theme is the dehumanization of the Jews. Throughout Night by Elie Wiesel, one can see the theme of dehumanization through the way the Nazi’s treated the Jews, spoke to the Jews, and how the Jews treated one another.

A meal time was one of the most important times of the day, for a prisoner. In the morning, a prisoner would be fed coffee or herbal tea. The Holocaust Explained states “For lunch prisoners would be given a litre of watery soup. If they were lucky, they might find a piece of turnip or potato peel.” (The Holocaust Explained.org 2014). For dinner, black bread, a tiny piece of sausage, and cheese. The black bread was supposed to be able to last prisoners throughout the night, and into the morning. Because of the bread’s durability, many prisoners secretly hid and stashed amounts of black bread to eat. In camps like Belzec, food was placed on a high value within the life of the prisoners, making reason for them to smuggle and steal it. But because of the constant work, brutality, and small portions of food that were given to the prisoners, many died and suffered from sickness caused by hunger. Through this, weight and muscle tissue were barely left on the bodies of the prisoners, with the lack of food and

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.” Elie and his family just wanted to live a normal life. They didn’t have very much money, but were happy with the state they were in. One day, SS officers showed up and took Elie and his family away. Not knowing where they were going, they were obviously scared. Once they finally got there, they realized what they were in for, and that Moishe the Beadle was right. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, the German Army dehumanizes Elie Wiesel and the rest of the Jewish prisoners by depriving them of love, safety, and physiological needs.

Greater than any war, plague, or catastrophe and it’s potential damage to human life is beyond calculation, the feeling of dehumanization is a feeling beyond description. Elie Wiesel a Jew Holocaust survivor from Sighet, Transylvania writes a memoir Night. In his memoir he writes about his own experiences in 1944 during the holocaust. Throughout this story Elie goes through lots of challenges that ultimately challenge his faith as a human. In resemblance, Jakob Blankitny a Jew from Maków Mazowiecki, Poland writes his take on his experiences in 1944 throughout the holocaust and how he and his family are treated by the Nazis and degraded as humans. In dire circumstances, these texts argue that dissolving one into a primitive with savage, animal characteristics are necessary for survival under inhumane conditions.

In fact, the lack of providing nutrition to Jews caused individual disruption: “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life” (Wiesel 52). The desperation was penetrating as each soul depended on the small rations of food given in the concentration camps. The admiration of an extra ration was something that all Jews longed for. In any case, they would do anything in order to receive a wholeness of satisfaction. Furthermore, starvation destroyed each individual: “I was nothing but a body, perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time” (Wiesel 52). The Jews were forced to think that they had no other choice but to rely on the support and hospitality of the Nazis. Their only motive to live was under the fear of death and the unknown. Unsatisfying nutrition breached each individual and made them desperate for change, which often led to their brutal

Wild beasts of prey, with animal hatred in their eyes; an extraordinary vitality had seized then, sharpening their teeth and nails” (Weisel, 95). Clearly, food as a method survival wasn’t a particularly effective way to stay alive. It tended to kill only those who used it as an attempt to stay alive. Fighting for food did not help save very many lives during the holocaust because it all wound down to simply being selfish, and caring only about yourself, though some people chose not to succumb to greed. Many people struggled for months or even years, to stay with their family, and to help each other through the holocaust.

They used it so the prisoners would not become strong enough to overthrow the authority and create a revolt. They would starve them to the brink of death. The prisoners would only get fed once a day and it would be a small ration of bread to make them feel full, when in reality their stomachs felt like it was devouring itself. However, that wasn’t the only method they used. Much like the Koreans, the Nazis used public execution. They would have a firing squad and literally have the prisoners dig their own graves as work. Then the firing squad would line the prisoners in front of their grave, so that when they shot the innocent people they would fall back into the grave (creating less work for the soldiers). In Night, there was a part of the book where Wiesel and his father were being transported to another camp with the rest of the prisoners. Once they finally reached the deadly destination, after days of walking in the snow, the guards left two large pots of soup unattended. Elie Wiesel was contemplating going and gorging himself since he had not had a decent meal in what seemed like forever. However, he was smarter than that. He saw a man begin to crawl from the bunker closest to the pots and slink towards the soup. In a blink of an eye, the man had many bullets in him and was killed. There was an abundance of cases where prisoners begging for food (or trying to steal some) being killed. It

In the morning we got metal cups and spoons. We were each given two slices of bread and sometimes a pat of margarine or a little bit of marmalade. The coffee was toasted acorns ground up. It tasted terrible. The midday meal was potato soup with maybe a li ttle bit of meat. Potatoes were the main ingredient and the kind of beets you normally feed to cattle. We were already hungry in the Theresienstadt ghetto because we did not get enough to eat. In Auschwitz we were beginning to starve. In the evening we go t another slice of bread, some coffee, no marmalade, no butter, no nothing.

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

     The prisoners are further degraded because they simply do not have enough to eat. They become very haggardly and often have difficulty in judging each other?s age. Acquisition of a sufficient amount of food becomes a daily struggle, and for those who do not rise to the occasion ultimately parish. After a certain time period, it is impossible to survive unless you become an ?Organisator, Kombinator, or a Prominent? (Levi, 89). Levi writes, ?We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs? (Levi, 33). A prisoner could only survive on a normal ration for around 3 months at best. Starving to death was not the main reason to acquire an adequate amount of food. The selections had to be avoided. If a prisoner was too weak to work, he was destined for the gas chambers.

A further aspect of Survival in Auschwitz that reinforces the dehumanizing effect of the death camp on the Jewish prisoners is the constant presence of hunger and starvation among the prisoners. Food and its acquisition and consumption are a constant topic that Primo Levi discusses because it constantly occupied the minds of most prisoners. Levi states, "We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs" (33). Bread and soup are the only things prisoners in the camp receive and whether you are served soup from the top or the bottom is of great importance. The prisoners would try to get soup from the bottom half of the vat because soup from the upper portion is mostly watery broth whereas soup from the bottom portion contains more vegetables pieces (33). The insatiable desire for food would lead prisoners to act in very animalistic ways. Upon waking up in the morning, prisoners would quickly make their beds and then run to the latrines urinating "while they run to save time, because within five minutes begins the