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
The novel Night by Elie Wiesel tells a devastating tale of a young man in concentration camp in World War II. Concentration camps were used in World War II to dehumanize and terrorize Jews. Dehumanization is the act of depriving humans of their rights and treating them as if they were worse than animals. Humans had been fighting for so long to get equality for everyone, but then Hitler rose to power and undid the work society had done. Many examples of how World War II used dehumanization were Hitler and his actions, leaving family members behind, and the labor camps in themselves.
Elie Wiesel uses metaphors, Rhetorical questions and personification to demonstrate that dehumanization ultimately causes negative, mental, physical changes in victims.
Dehumanization is the denial of human rights. Night by Elie Wiesel depicts the events that dehumanized the Jews during the holocaust. Hitler dehumanized the Jews by stripping them of their identities, treating them like animals and making them turn on one another.
Twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time on Jewish mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. Even when the family and Elie were pushed to ghettos they remained calm and compliant. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can hardly move and have to survive on minimal food and water.
They live in barracks that were crammed with over 700 people or more in them. They were constantly moving also, referring to page 79, "Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?" The jewish people were constantly moving between camps and running from armies, which did not give them the adequate shelter a person needs. They didn't have a home, where they could be comforted they just kept moving not knowing where their lives were going next. The Nazi army did not give them the physiological needs you have to have to survive like shelter and food.
“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.
In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel writes about his experience inside the concentration camps of Germany during World War II. He realizes how his humanity changes after he is free. Elie ponders about if he can be re-humanized after he passes trials, when he looks at a mirror. Wiesel uses a gloomy tone to reveal how Elie succeeds in survival through dehumanization.
In the memoir, Night , by Elie Wiesel is about Elie’s experience with the Holocaust. In the many work camps he traveled, he witnessed many cases of dehumanization. The word “Dehumanization” means a group of people assert the inferiority of another group. The humans that are inferior think that race of people shouldn’t deserve of moral consideration. When the Wiesel’s arrived at Birkenau, reception center for Auschwitz; Wiesel experienced his first case of dehumanization when he gets separated from his mother and his daughter. When he arrived at Auschwitz he gets tattooed a number; this is where the SS officers striped his birth name away. At Buna, Wiesel witnessed many followings because his fellow jews have committed crime. Throughout
Wiesel uses a Rhetorical Question to demonstrate that dehumanization causes people to not care whether they live or die. For example Eliezer states that it would not matter when he died: “Here or else where- what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was long and never ending” (Wiesel 72). This quotation demonstrates that it did not matter when he died because he knew it was going to happen and Eliezer was careless. The use of the words die today or tomorrow, or later implies that No matter what day it is either way he will eventually die.
Dehumanization made Eli loses faith in God. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, thousands of Jews gathered in silence to pray to God. Eli sees this and asks..."What are You, my God? "How do You compare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith, their anger, their defiance" (66). "Eli wonders why so many Jews still prayed to God even though they were at a concentration camp. The German's treated the Jews as if they were less than nothing. This made the Jews and especially Elie lose faith in God. Elie wonders what they did to deserve this torture. He often questions weather or not God has given up on them. Due to Germans treating Elie as an animal, he believes he is unworthy. Elie agrees he is unworthy because he believes he is nothing
Elie Wiesel uses metaphor and simile to demonstrate that dehumanization ultimately causes severe mental and physical changes in the victims.
Gaining absolute power begins with dehumanization of the people in order to gain control. Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is a retelling of Wiesel’s own agonizing experiences at a concentration camp. Wiesel shares his story of traumatizing events such as seeing people strangling others for food and leaving his dad to die. Wiesel’s was treating less and less like a human during his imprisonment. In Night, the bell at the concentration camp symbolizes the dehumanization of the prisoners by the Nazis.
“Never shall I forget the small faces of the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transform into smoke under the silent sky.” - Elie Wiesel. This quote is very important to dehumanization because children are being burned during the holocaust. The holocaust was in WWII. The jewish race was being exterminated. In the memoir, Night, Wiesel reveals the theme of dehumanization throughout the book. Dehumanization affected Elie’s identity; however he still wrote the book because he wanted his readers to understand how bad this time period was.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel is the recounting of a teenage Wiesel’s experience during the Holocaust, through a narrator named Eliezer. Throughout the text, the Nazis use many sinister methods to dehumanize their victims physically, mentally, and emotionally. One of these methods is controlling every aspect of their victims’ lives. In Night, upon entering a camp, none of the Nazis care to keep any Jewish families together, and they do not allow the prisoners to keep any items that have value, including the gold crowns on their teeth (Wiesel 51). Also, the Nazis use a bell to signal when the Jews must wake up, go to work, and go to sleep (Wiesel 73), and they choose the portion of food that each person gets, as well as when they get it (Wiesel 61). Another method of
The memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel is about a teenage boy name Eliezer and what his family and he went through during the Holocaust. Eliezer goes through so many different kinds of situations and faces many problems as well. Throughout the book, it tells readers about how Nazi dehumanized their victims during the Holocaust. There is three stages of dehumanization mentally, physically and emotionally and Eliezer went through all three stages of dehumanization, not only him but many Jews did as well.