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.

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.

“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.

The greatest change to Elie Wiesel’s identity was his loss of faith in God. Before he and his family were moved to the camps, Wiesel was a religious little boy who cried after praying at night (2). When the Hungarian police come to force the Jews to move to the ghettos, they pulled Elie from his prayers (13). Even on his way to Auschwitz, stuffed inside the cattle car with other terrified Jews, Wiesel gave thanks to God when told he would be assigned to labor camps (24). After a few days in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel heard about the crematory and the fact that the Nazis were killing the sick, weak, and young. In his first night in the camp, Wiesel experienced his first crisis of faith: Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. …Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust (32).

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

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

The actions the Nazis committed during WWII were unbearable for even the strongest people. Prisoners were tortured, starved, and slaughtered just for being Jewish. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, had to endure the atrocities at the age of 15. Wiesel describes these events in his memoir Night. A result of the dehumanization and other cruelty that he faces leads Elie Wiesel to a loss of his faith.

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.

According to webster's dictionary, dehumanization is treating someone as though he or9 she is not a human being. In"Night"written by Elie Wiesel, the Germans treated the jews like animals, and over time they started acting like it. While many fall victim to the fate of becoming a brute, Elie retains his civility. No matter how viciously they treated Elie, he never loses his love for his father. For example, Elie had a choice to stay in the infirmary and become liberated, or go with his father on the march to Buchenwald and risk death.

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the Nazis employ various acts of dehumanization towards the prisoners of Auschwitz and too many other lives in other camps around Nazi Europe. The Nazis take away the prisoner’s identities, starve them, and treat them like animals so much so that it causes them to begin to act like animals themselves. All of these atrocities align with Nazi Germany’s goal of killing the Jewish people and other groups as well. The repeated instances of dehumanization makes the prisoners much easier to control because all of these things combined take away their hope and without hope they have no chance of escape.

Within the story Night, Elie Wiesel puts the reader into his perspective and takes them on a journey through his Holocaust experience. He deeply describes his moments in and out of concentration camps, death marches and cattle car rides using first person pronouns throughout the story. The use of first person really composes the reader to personally consider themselves as Wiesel and draws their attention to the story in order to create a superior reading experience. When using first person, Elie describes how his personality, emotional and mental feelings change during the course of the story. He utterly expressed how the constant demand to abide by the Nazis steadily dehumanized every individual prisoner.

Have you ever felt like lesser of a person than someone else? Maybe because of something they said? Or something they did? The psychology of the victimizer and victim was studied by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in his Stanford prison study experiment. His research provides insight into the evils inflicted by guards of the Holocaust and its impact on their prisoners.