Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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.

Millions of innocent lives were taken away. Families were separated from each other. Day by day the lives of human beings were being tortured. Out of the many lives that were ended some lasted and survived. Elie Wiesel was one to survive. Elie witnessed the daily life of horrible situations. Human beings began to lose hope in living. No human being would have ever thought they would live day by day being tortured till their death. He entered the camp in 1944 at age 15 and in 1945 the camp was liberated. Wiesel did not survive alone, his two older sisters survived as well. When the camp was liberated it does not mean that the lives taken away from innocent people were forgotten. Elie Wiesel wrote various amounts of books to keep this drastic history living. This occasion deserves to be forever passed on, the lives of purity need to be a

Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.

The nazis dehumanized the Jews so it would be easier to hurt them by treating them as if they were nothing. The nazi soldiers didn’t even call the Jews by their names; they called them by numbers. “ I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 60). The Nazis didn’t call them by name because it would have given them human characteristics. The only people that would call him Elie were his family and friends. When ever he was needed, they were called by their number, “ One day, when we had just returned from the warehouse, I was summoned by the block secretary: A-7713?” (69) The nazis didn’t give any respect to any of the Jews.

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.

“In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (PG.36). Elie is a jewish boy from Transylvania and is taken to Auschwitz where he is separated from his mother and sister. His father and Elie are moved the the concentration camp called “Buna” and spend most of their time there. They then had to be evacuated to Gleiwitz, where they ran about 42 miles to get there. They spent about 3 days there and then they were transported to Buchenwald by train. There they are rescued by Americans and a resistance part that attacked the camp. Sadly Elie’s father dies in Buchenwald due to a sickness and being sent to the crematory. Dehumanization of the Jewish people in “Night” ,by Elie Wiesel, happened in a variety of ways and helped Hitler achieve his ideas about Jewish people.

In the book, our narrator, Elie, is constantly going through changes, and almost all of them are due to his time spent in Auschwitz. Prior to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie was a very different boy, he had a more optimistic outlook on life. During the first few pages of the book, Elie tells us a bit about how he viewed the world before deportation, “ I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” ( 3). Elie was, as he says himself, deeply observant and devoted most of his time to his faith. He spent almost all of his time studying and worshiping. At this point, Elie’s faith is the center of his life. Elie is also shown to do a few other things and has a few more early character traits aside from being dedicated to what he believes in. Elie also sees the best of people, a few pages later he says, “The news is terrible,’ he said at last. And then one word: ‘transports’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely… ‘Where will they take us?” (Wiesel 14). This is one of the only time we hear about Elie being worried or scared because of the Germans before Auschwitz, and still, despite the warnings that were given and the rumors circulating, Elie doesn’t think that the Germans are actually going to do all of those terrible things. Around this time in the book, Wiesel starts to become more emotionally weighted, but none of what has happened takes full effect until much later. There are multiple instances in the book where Elie is given reason to distrust or even hate the Germans, he talks about how the Gestapo treated him and his family on page 19 “‘Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!’ the Hungarian police were screaming.”. Yet he then goes on to say, on that very same page, that “Still our first

The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of love. Elie, along with most of the other people in the camps, aren’t really accepted socially by anyone. They weren’t accepted as a person, and no one even knew them by their names; furthermore, they were known by the number they had tattooed on their arms. On page 42, Elie says “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” By having their names taken away, the Jewish people had their social acceptance stripped from them. Also, their families were taken away from them, and they had to do whatever they could to stay with them. As Elie said on page 30, “My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone.” By separating the Jews from their families, they lost the love from them. By depriving the jews of social acceptance and their families, they hardly felt any

At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elie's group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his father lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz. Elie's mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie is now against God, who remains silent. Elie and his father manage through all the pain and horrific sights and fight through it all. In the novel “Night” Elie Wiesel shows dehumanization in many occurrences throughout the book. Pg 13 “ The gestapo had threatened to shoot him if he talked.” Pg 36 “ He was weeping bitterly. I thought he was crying with joy at still being alive.” Pg. 53 “ Beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more

The Jews were the only ones who were persecuted during the holocaust. While Elie and his father were in the camp they were persecuted horrifically. When they first got to the (the first camps name) they stayed together everyday and every night. Elie was not going to let his father slip away that easy. Elie’s father did his best to take care of his son but it was very hard. Elie’s father would give him his rations. That is the kind of selfless love a father has for his son. Over the years Elie’s father began to grow weaker and it was an even more difficult time. One time Elie and his father had to lie about their age just so they could live and stay together. If the Jews did not do as they were told they were hit and sometimes even put in the cremation house. The Nazis did not have any sympathy towards the Jews and thats how Hitler liked it. Another type of propaganda used is fear. The Jews feared the Nazis every single day of their lives at the camps. All the Jews did not know when their day was coming, but knew it was coming soon. If some of the Jews were to old to work they were killed and so everyone tried to work as hard as they could no matter what age they were or how they felt. The nazis worked the Jews like dogs day in and day out. Elie feared not only for his life but also for his dads. Elie stuck with his dad till the end and it was well worth

Throughout the duration of the Holocaust, many Jews witnessed the worst of humanity. In concentration camps, over six million people were killed and tortured. Among the people imprisoned in these camps was Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. In his memoir Night, the many acts of dehumanization and cruelty that Wiesel witnesses ultimately leads to his loss of faith in both his god and humanity.

One of Adolf Hitler’s promises was to eliminate the Jewish race. In order for this to happen, you must first see people as less than human. Once you have accomplished this task, the mass murder of millions of people becomes easy. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the multitude of times he was seen as less than human, and how this affected his life while in concentration camps. The dehumanization of the prisoners not only crushes them, it causes them to become desensitized and often see each other as less than human.

The Holocaust was a very terrible time in history over six million Jews perished in concentration camps. Even though in every tragedy there are survivors. Elie Wiesel was a little boy when all of this happened. He experienced all of the terrible things that happened during this time frame. While suffering in the terrible condition of the camp Elie and his father’s relationship goes through a drastic change.

Thus, through Elie's loss of identity, Wiesel implies that dehumanization was the most barbaric torture that the Jews had to encounter. In addition, there is more than a way of how the Nazis treated a young boy like Elie. In the context, "Here kid, how old are you? I'm not quite fifteen yet. No eighteen But I'm not, I said. Fifteen. Fool, listen to what I say. Then he questioned my father, who replied. Fifty. No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and forty." Elie and his father have to change their identity, their age to convince the Germans that they are both still strong to work for

Hot box cars, moans of anguish and loud cries for help. Like an animal in captivity waiting to be free of this never ending prison. Dehumanization to its finest, Jewish people had to endure this every day. Not only that but being classified,symbolized,organized, polarized, prepared, exterminated and lastly denied. In this autobiography “Night” by Elie Wiesel he explains the day to day torment he had go through and some of his experiences at one of the worst Concentration camp, Auschwitz.