Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the unforgettable tale of his account of the savagery and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a budding Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. He and his family are exiled to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must master the skills needed to survive with his father’s guidance until he finds liberation from the monstrosity that is the camp. This memoir, however, hides a far more meaningful lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.

Something interesting that I found in this book is that they were forced to run 42 miles, and the guards were instructed to shoot the ones who fell behind. Many men were lost in this run because of their lack of strength and endurance. To the Jews, the run was like an endless road, which could also symbolize their lives because the torturing they were going through seem never ending such as the road they were on. Many of them considered stopping running because at the time, death symbolized freedom because they knew it was the only way to escape the pain. This imagery gives the reader a strong image of what Wiesel was trying to get the reader to feel. This event changed my perspective history, as it raised my respect for families of the lost because I can barely

First, the reader views Wiesel’s personality changes as a result of life in Auschwitz. Perhaps the most obvious change is his steadily increasing disinterest of religion. Before his internment, Wiesel demonstrates a growing interest in the religion of his parents. During the day, he studied Talmud, a legal commentary on the Torah, or the Jewish Ten Commandments. At night, he would worship at the synagogue, “to weep over the

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

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.

In the beginning of the memoir, Wiesel tells of how the Jews in Sighet are not afraid of Hitler or his power. They don’t believe that someone could be that cruel, and they were also in denial that they could exterminate a whole race of people that lived all over the world. As time progresses, they are forced to turn over all their gold, jewels, and objects of value. The next step the German soldiers take is to force all Jews to wear the yellow star. The conditions keep getting worse and eventually all the Jews are forced to leave in packed cattle cars. Before they were deported, the Hungarian police inflict fear in the Jews by telling them to run and beating them with their truncheons. The police yell, “‘Faster!’ [...] ‘Faster! Faster! Get on with you, lazy swine!” (Wiesel 17). By comparing the Jews to swine it depresses them and causes the beatings and running to seem more harsh. After a couple days of travel in the cramped car, Wiesel’s car arrives

Over the course of history, many people from many nations dehumanized the Jews. In the book Night, Jews were treated as if they were not humans. When Dr. Mengele sorts Wiesel and his father in Birkenau, Wiesel says that “[they] did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria” (Wiesel 32). When being questioned by Dr. Mengele, he only asks only for his age, health, and profession to seek whether Wiesel would be a good candidate as a slave or should be exterminated immediately upon arrival in the crematorium. The doctor does not stop to consider that Wiesel is a human being. Throughout Europe, many Europeans refused to help Jews, in fact, more Germans killed Jews than saved them (Gutman and Schatzker 227-228). Hitler was not alone in massacring millions of Jews. Once the Nazi regime rose to power, their first step was to wipe out all traces of the Jewish nation (Gutman and Schatzker 39-40). After the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was nevertheless strong and many Jews did not want to return home. For example, Jews from Poland were still dealing with pogroms, such as the progrom in Kiele in 1946, where at least 42 Jews were killed (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Jewish communities such as Lodge, Poland were destroyed. Homes that were not destroyed were stolen by neighbours and locals. Children that survived were often left orphaned and those who went into hiding did not remember their parents (The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program). Because of the dehumanization Jews faced from leaders and fellow citizens,

Wiesel and his fellow jews first experience dehumanization when the Hungarian police burst into their homes in Sighet. They were not allowed to keep any items that had meaning to them “A Jew no longer had the right to keep in his house gold, jewels, or any objects of value” (Wiesel 8). The process of stripping them of their identities continues as they get to the concentration camps. When Eliezer becomes a member of Block 17, the first thing to go was his name. SS officers lined up prisoners and Eliezer says “I became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (Wiesel 31). Eliezer refers to himself as a number now rather than his name. As the Jews are stripped of their identity, they are constantly viewed as nothing.

In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel depicts the steady escalation of dehumanization to which the Nazis subjected the Jews during the Holocaust and how it helped the Nazis crush the Jews’ spirits and justify their persecution and eventual genocide. Before the arrival of German soldiers, Wiesel and the other Jews of Sighet live in relative harmony with their Christian neighbors. But once the Nazis arrive, they steadily remove the Jews’ human rights until their fellow citizens no longer view them as human anymore. Thus, there is little action taken by the non-Jewish residents of Sighet when the persecutions and deportations begin. Additionally, the gradual pace of the dehumanization managed to convince the Jews that nothing significant was happening and that this was just a temporary phase that would soon pass. This could not be further from the truth. Once the Nazis finally issue the order to deport the Jews of Sighet, Wiesel notices that his neighbors’ spirits have been completely crushed: “There they went, defeated, their bundles, their lives in tow, having left behind their homes, their childhood. They passed me by, like beaten dogs, with never a glance in my direction. They must have envied me” (Wiesel 17). Wiesel describes his fellow Jews as downtrodden and defeated since they are now completely subject to the Nazi officers. The Nazis have stripped their rights, driven them from their homes, and treated them like animals. Being called and treated like animals, specifically

The Holocaust was part of most infamous events in our modern world history, World War II. Night by Elie Wiesel shows one of the horrific lives lived in a concentration camp. This book brings insights including ways and effects of dehumanization and also effects on the antagonist’s followers.

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.

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.

The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own