In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie gives us insight on his three-year long journey as a prisoner of the holocaust. He informs his readers that the Jewish community had to withstand the dehumanization brought upon by depraved Germans, deprived Jews, and the war inside of themselves. Elie relays his experiences, focusing on the dehumanization the Jewish population suffered from the Nazis through cruel punishments, and harsh epithets. The Jews endured severe castigation for many years; for example, on page 85, Elie stated, “they had orders to shoot anyone who could not sustain the pace. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of the pleasure. If one of us stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the ‘filthy dog’”. To Germans, their ability to take the life of those who were weak. The Jews were frightened and gave up complete control to the Germans so they would not experience the Germans punitive actions. Elie also mentioned the day the doctor came into the room saying, “In fact, that doctor had come only to finish off patients. I listened to him …show more content…
He recalled the moment he was watching an execution, stating, “I watched other hangings. I never saw a single victim weep. These withered bodies had long forgotten the bitter taste of tears”. Wiesel established how dire the situation is, explaining the emotions everyone had blocked out. Having learned that death was inevitable. This reveals the helplessness and emotional exhaustion they all felt from their suffering. Wiesel also said, “we were incapable of thinking, our senses numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything”. This quote emphasizes how most people had given up on hope and motivation; freedom was no longer a good enough reason to live to them. Wiesel showed generations the horrid outcome of the dehumanization brought upon by different
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.
Imagine, losing the part of you that makes you unique, or being treated like you were worth absolutely nothing. Think about losing all that you hold on to: your family, friends, everything that you had. Imagine, being treated like an animal, or barely receiving enough food to live. All of these situations and more is what the Jews went through during the Holocaust. During the period of 1944 - 1945, a man by the name of Elie Wiesel was one of the millions of Jews that were experiencing the wrath of Hitler’s destruction in the form of intense labor and starvation. The novel Night written by the same man, Elie Wiesel, highlights the constant struggle they faced every single day during the war. From the first acts of throwing the Jews into
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.
Elie Wiesel uses metaphors, Rhetorical questions and personification to demonstrate that dehumanization ultimately causes negative, mental, physical changes in victims.
In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.
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
In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie wrote about his journey through the Holocaust and how it impacted his faith. Before the Holocaust, Elie became very passionate about Judaism, but his learning was stopped abruptly because the Nazis had arrived. The Nazis took away his teacher, along with his neighbors. Soon, the Nazis came back for the remaining citizens and loaded them into a train. This was the beginning of the Holocaust, in which Elie would experience many horrific events. Throughout Night, Elie’s faith decreases because of the harsh conditions of concentration camps and the declining health of his father.
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.
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.
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.
Although Eliezer survived the bloodcurdling Holocaust, countless others succumbed to the Nazi’s inhumanity. The Nazi’s progressively reduced the Jewish people to being little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place, as the Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Germans dehumanized Eliezer, his father, and other fellow Jews for the duration of the memoir Night, which had a lasting effect on Eliezer’s identity, attitude and outlook. Wiesel displays the Nazi’s vicious actions to accentuate the way by which they dehumanize the Jewish population. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, among other horrific actions.
The holocaust was a terrible period of punishment and abuse for many who were discriminated against, especially the jews. One of these jews was Elie Wiesel. He is the author of the book Night a autobiography on his life as a Jew in the Holocaust. Throughout the book Elie displayed many traits. Elie’s traits include loyalty, determination, and religiousness. The characterization of Elie the protagonist and the other characters plays a role in creating and supporting a theme in the novel Night. From reading the novel we can tell that Elie Wiesel's night shows that the holocaust was a very difficult time for jews and that it made them lose faith in god.
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.
On the second day at the concentration camp, Elie explains an incident in which he almost decided to kill himself and end his suffering. While walking towards a fire pit with a group of Jews, Elie says that “if [he] was going to kill [him]self, this was the time” (Wiesel 33). As he approaches the pit, he internally says good-bye to “his father, to the whole universe” and finds himself “face-to-face with the Angel of death”, conveying that Elie’s suffering has in essence killed him (Wiesel 34). Through revealing the mindset that it may be better to die than to encounter any more suffering, Wiesel illustrates that the concentration camps have broken him, shattering his identity. The suffering is so unbearable that Elie feels even death is a better option, depicting that not only has the suffering failed to make him stronger, it has weakened him to a point that living no longer feels worthwhile. Hence, Elie’s suffering throughout the holocaust makes him consider killing himself and lose the will to live, demonstrating that suffering has made him
WWII was the 10th-longest U.S. combat force participation. The war started on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945. Over 60 million service personnel and civilians were killed. The nation that suffered the most loss was the USSR. The novel Night by Elie Wiesel, was a story about the author, Elie Wiesel, experiencing the Nazi concentration camps with his father while WWII was happening. In the story, Elie’s family failed to escape the city of Sighet. This caused his family to be captured and separated by the Germans. He was then left with his father while his mom and sister was somewhere else. During his time at the camp with his father, they were suffering to survive. In the end, Elie’s father died and he had to move on with his life after he survived the concentration camps. Based on an analysis of Night, Elie Wiesel wrote the novel to warn future generations of dehumanization of people, having to break a family bond, and sufferings that occured during WWII.