The Holocaust was life changing for the Jewish people. Inside the book Night, Eliezer Wiesel is a Jewish boy whom’s emotion and spirituality changes after his imprisonment in the concentration camps. The Jewish people, including Eliezer, faced dehumanization many times during this period of time. Teenagers should learn about the Holocaust because it engages students to think critically and self-reflect, by doing so they can make essential connections between the history and the contemporary moral choices they confront with their own lives.
Eliezer spent almost two years in concentration camps. At the age of fifteen when Eliezer and his family went to their first concentration camp, Eliezer witnessed his family being split up at the gates,
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.
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.
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.
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
In May 1944, Elie Wiesel was fifteen years old when he and his family got transported to Auschwitz. In the concentration camps, many inmates were treated poorly and went under many “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to truly be dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” (Primo Levi, Holocaust Survivor) Primo Levi was a Holocaust survivor that believed the common man was more dangerous than actual monsters. The common man is unpredictable and will sometimes act without a second thought. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel his gold tooth, the food rations, and their ID’s symbolize the dehumanization and the desperation of the Jews during the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel describes numerous ways people are stripped of their humanity. Elie and his father and those around him were dehumanized. I think this happened because they had lost hope to live on and because they experience such horrible thing in the concentration camp. I think this lasting impact had the people who in the concentration to forget who they were and forget that they are human.
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.
Throughout Elie Wiesel’s Experiences at the concentration camp his views on faith, life, and himself altered significantly. The Nazis strategized how they were going to exterminate and torture the prisoners physically as well as mentally. Although the prisoners were devalued by the nazis they often devalued themselves. The Nazis deprived prisoners of basic human rights in order to brainwash them into devaluing themselves.
“Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies”- Elie Wiesel. Night written by Elie Wiesel is a memoir about the dehumanization that occurred during World War II. Elie writes as his younger self, Eliezer. Eliezer and his family are Jewish and live in Transylvania. Then in 1944, the German Nazis came to take everything away.
Dehumanization is something that everyone in the camps went through. They were treated like less than dirt in the camps. Elie Wiesel fought it through the love for his father. It was his motivation to keep moving and survive. Elie faced constant verbal and physical abuse in the camp, so much so that it was considered abnormal not to be verbally and physically abused.
During the Holocaust, Jews turned on each other to fight for scrapes of food and family bonds were meaningless. Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who wrote about all the atrocities that occurred during the catastrophic genocide in his memoir Night. Nazis would make the Jews undergo unspeackable things, such as gas chambers and live creamation. They treated the Jews like they were less than human and slowly they dehumanized them. All throughout the Holocaust the Nazis dehumanized Elie and thousands of other Jews by making them fight agaianst each other for food, and by making sons having to decide between their fathers or their own self-preservation.
In his autobiographical memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel conveys the dehumanization of the Jews through the devastating events placed upon them in the concentration camps. In an attempt to show the Jews’ inferiority, the Nazis created the concentration camps, which stripped them of their identities, one by one. The Germans shaved each prisoner’s hair off, dressed them in the same clothes, and referred to them as numbers instead of their name. Jews lived under agonizing circumstances. They were unhealthy and weak but were still able to endure such intense circumstances day after day instead of being shot or sent to the gas chambers.
Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, is the story of cruel events being retold. A personal recollection of a nightmare experience brings the reader into the heart of what the Holocaust was for a Jew in 1933 to 1945 . As the story is told, the hatred and evil of the German Nazi’s becomes more and more clear. Dehumanization is the act of reducing Jews to below the human standard, and this was vividly seen in Night. Because of this dehumanization, the Jews were treated accordingly- as less than humans. The cruel acts of the Germans led to this dehumanization of Jews when they shuttled the Jews, trafficked Jewish children, and burned their live bodies.
Put into ghettos, treated like animals, forced to wear the Star of David, the Jews went through years of torment and dehumanization. The Nazis made it their goal to “liquidate” all of the Jews with these inhumane practices. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the author describes what he endured inside of the concentration camps. Elie portrays the pain and agony he watched, including his own father’s death. Throughout the novel, the Jews are constantly mistreated, abused, but most importantly dehumanized.