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Examples Of Dehumanism In Night By Elie Wiesel

Decent Essays

Taylor The Nazis did everything in their power to dehumanize the inmates in the concentration camps during the holocaust. Night follows the story of a member of the Jewish community, Eliezer Wiesel. This book is Eliezer’s retelling of his experience in the camps, losing his belongings, his family, and finally his humanity. Before you even have any notion that the camps exist you are trapped in your community, your “ghetto”. The Nazi army walls you into your ghetto and traps you, then you are made to identify yourselves by wearing a specific symbol, in the case of Elie Wiesel-a jew-the Star of David. After being in the ghetto for a few days (or weeks, depending on the situation), you are sent to the camps. This is where they begin to rip the status of “human” from you. This is where you are stuffed into into the train car: “The Hungarian police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one.” (By the end of the book they were so skinny that they could fit one-hundred to a car) “They handed us some bread, a few pails of water. They checked the bars on the windows to make sure they would not come loose. The cars were sealed. One person was placed in charge of every car: if someone managed to escape, that person would be shot.” Eighty people can barely fit in a train car, you see. “There was little air. The lucky ones found themselves near a window; they could watch the blooming countryside flit by.” They traveled like this for days, no food, no water, no air

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