Dehumanization

After 3 weeks at Auschwitz, they get deported to Buna, which is a turning point for the relationship between Elie and Chlomo. The camps influence Elie and give him a crooked mind focused on staying alive and nothing else. This leads to him disregarding his father. This twisted way of thinking, due to the camps, is making Elie cheer during bomb raids at Buna. He states his thoughts “But we were no longer afraid of death, at any rate, not of that death” (57). This shows that he is willing to die to see the camps destroyed. The most horrifying event that demonstrates his twisted mind is when Eliezer pays no heed to his father while he was being repeatedly beat with an iron bar. Eliezer, rather than acting indifferent and showing nothing, actually feels angry with his father. “I was angry at him for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak” (52). The new lifestyle of the camps affected Elie and his relationship with his father for the worse.

Wiesel also uses imagery, of Eliezer loosing the ability to express emotion, to show the dehumanization of Eliezer and the other Jews who are led to undergo drastic emotional changes. Unfortunately, the Jews suffer tremendous difficulties in the concentration camps. The torture that the enslaved Jews experience has obvious physical effects, but it also has mental changes on them. The events that have taken place at the concentration camps has shaken Eliezer so much, that at the sight of his stricken father, he replies, “My father had just been struck, before my eyes, and I had not flickered an eyelid. I had looked on and said nothing.” (Pg. 37 old book) After the Kapo beats his father to the ground for asking permission to use the bathroom, Elieizer is surprised at himself because he is incapable of doing so much as lifting a finger or saying anything in his father's defense. Like the other Jews, he is dehumanized with his main concern becoming self-preservation. Thus, Eliezer looses his compassion for others, including his father. When his father dies due to dysentery, Eliezer states, “I did not weep and it pained me that I could not weep.

the horrific events in the concentration camp and the ever-present risk of death does Eliezer

In the concentration camp Eliezer can’t understand why God allows so much death and destruction, and even though he is angry and questions God he never loses his faith. Although Eliezer never has his questions answered he never loses his faith. Eliezers evolving relationship with God is a major source of character development for himself.

Language has the ability to impact the mood and tone of a piece in literature. In Night, Wiesel uses imagery, symbolism, diction and foreshadowing to illustrate dehumanization. The deeper true horror of the Holocaust is not what they Nazi’s did, but the behavior they legitimized as human beings being dehumanized by one another through silence and apathy.

The mental aspect of dehumanization seemed to cut as sharply as any weapon used by the Nazis. Adolescent Eliezer seemed to have a strong spiritual connection before he endured life in the concentration. This seemed to be the case as he shared that at an early age, he found a master named moishe to teach him Kabbalah. The two would meet every evening and remain in the synagogue long after the faithful had gone (pgs.4-5). Conversely, after he and his family endured the camps, he began to make statements such as, “ Why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because he caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves?( Wiesel 67). Eliezer being the faithful young man he is, never would consider words like those in his vocabulary. Along with the narrator’s religious pathing fading away in the midst of the camp. Eliezer and the rest of the Jewish civilians in the camp have to withstand the unkempt conditions of the bunks in which is the same place they sleep eat ,and release their bodily fluids. By this, I can look up to Eliezer, because knowing myself. I would not be able endure one second of being in the bunks, let alone years just as the narrator and his father had to

Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and is used frequently in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, acts of cruelty are used to express the theme and enhance its message. One of the largest themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, the common people, and other Jews. Watching the large amounts of violence, abuse, and discrimination that occur in this memoir show us the horrors of the Holocaust and how it transformed the men and women who it experienced it, as well as those who caused it.

During his time in the concentration camps, Elie’s outlook on life shifted to a very pessimistic attitude, showing emotions and actions including rebellion, forgetfulness of humane treatment, and selfishness. Elie shows rebellion early in the Holocaust at the Solemn Service, a jewish ceremony, by thinking, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). Elie had already shifted his view on his religion and faith in God. After witnessing some of the traumas of the concentration camps, Elie questioned what he did to deserve such treatment. Therefore, he began to rebel against what he had grown up learning and believing. Not only had Elie’s beliefs changed, his lifestyle changed as well. When Elie’s foot swelled, he was sent to the doctor, where they put him “...in a bed with white sheets. I [he] had forgotten that people slept in sheets” (Wiesel 78). Many of the luxuries that Elie may have taken for granted have been stripped of their lives, leaving Elie and the other victims on a thin line between survival and death. By explaining that he forgot about many of these common luxuries, Elie emphasizes the inhumane treatment the victims of the Holocaust were put through on a daily basis.

Even though Eliezer was able to persevere, he was dehumanized by the Nazi’s in an atrocious and cold-blooded fashion. When a human is emotionally and physically stripped of their pride, it weakens his or her will to live. The Nazis targeted the Jews' humanity, and slowly dissolved their feeling of being an independant human. Elie Wiesel states “He took his time between lashes, only the first really hurt...twenty-four…twenty-five. It was over. I had not realized it but I had fainted.” (Wiesel 62). In the case of the Jews doing anything askew, they were to be punished in barbaric ways. This whipping by the Nazi’s had a drastic affect on Eliezer's identity, because before his punishment Eliezer had not yet altered his inquisitive mindset. Eliezer was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and as a result he was thrashed and trounced on by one of the German soldiers. This traumatized Eliezer and brought fear upon him, changing his attitude.

Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel uses metaphors to demonstrate that dehumanization ultimately causes emotional, mental and physical traumas.

The Holocaust was a horrific time period when over six million Jewish people were systematically exterminated by the Nazi government. Throughout this period, the Jews were treated particularly inhumane because the Nazi viewed their ethnicities as a disease to humanity. Dehumanization is a featured theme in Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Holocaust since he demonstrated numerous examples of the severe conditions endured by the Jewish people. The nonfiction story Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on inhumanity and reveals human beings are capable of committing great atrocities and behaving cruelly, when such actions are condoned by society, peer pressure, and ethical beliefs. Elie Wiesel uses literary devices to produce a consistent theme of inhumanity.

When Stein, a forgotten relative, approached Eliezer and his father on their eight day of living in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, he wanted information on his wife and two kids whom Eliezer's mother had corresponded with in the past. Stein and his family had been separated two years ago and he desperately wanted to know how they were doing. While Eliezer did not have any knowledge about Stein's family, caught between indecision, he decided to lie. He

While Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy subjugated to the violence of the Holocaust in Night, embarks on his atrocious journey in struggling to survive the brutality perpetrated on him, he loses his innocence in the traumatic circumstances. Wiesel’s main aspiration of writing about his development from childhood to adulthood is to showcase how cruelty within society can darken innocents’ souls. As Elie grows throughout the story, he starts to understand that he has changed from a pure, little child to a young man filled with distress and thoughts of danger. He reflects over what kind of individual he has evolved into because of the all the killings and torture he has witnessed: “I too had become a different

Power allows people to control outcomes with respect to both the environment and the self . This control is considered to be a fundamental human need ; therefore, it follows that powerlessness will disrupt an individual's sense of humanity, which coincides with the fact that many civilizations have equated power deprivation with humbleness, lowliness, and fewer expressed human traits. We based the current study on this notion in order to demonstrate that perceived powerlessness induces self-dehumanization.