Examples Of Dehumanization In Night

In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, Wiesel writes about the experiences of Eliezer, his family, and fellow Jews, he explained how the Nazis gradually changes the way the Jews lived little by little. Dehumanization is the process of stripping a person of every quality that makes him human and changing them to fit their needs. Dehumanizing started when Eliezer and other Jews in his community are evacuated from their homes in Sighet. They were transported in cattle cars which related the Jews to no more than livestock. After the harsh transportation the Jews arrived at Auschwitz a concentration camp where Eliezer spent many months of his life. They were whipped, ran, and starved till some of the Jews could not take it. In Elie Wiesel book he explains how he found the stamina to survive these cruel conditions.

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.

Dehumanization played a significant role throughout Elie Wiesel's "Night". In many historic references to the Holocaust the killing of the Jews were described as "methodical and systematical"(The Jewish Outreach Institute), though this is true, these heinous crimes were made even worse by the dehumanizing and appalling treatment and conditions that the Jews were put through. Here are some examples:

Dehumanization Makes You Show no Emotion Millions of Jews had no emotion when they were getting dehumanized in the concentration camps. Night is a book about Elie Wiesel, a 15 year old Jewish boy who gets taken to Auschwitz. The memoir goes over all of the terrible things Elie experienced at his time in the camp. In Night, Elie Wiesel demonstrates that when being dehumanized, there is zero emotion involved. He shows this when his father is beaten, when he watches other Jews get hung, and when his father dies.

Throughout the story Night, Eliezer, his father, and many other Jews are treated as inferior to the point where they are not even considered humans. This term is known as dehumanization and is used by the Nazis during the course of the story. In chapter two, the Jews are thrown into cattle cars as a form of transportation. The Jews are nearly squeezed to death and treated like animals. Whenever the Jews first arrive at the camps, their identities are completely wiped, they are just referred to as numbers and letters.

In his memoir Night ,Elie Wiesel metaphor to demonstrate that dehumanization ultimately causes severe mental and physical changes in the victim.

During the times of the Holocaust, the Nazi forces enacted many cruel and unusual punishments to the innocents they deemed unfit. They dealt with them by sending them to ghettos, death camps, and concentration camps where the Nazis worked their captives to death and massacred those who did not do as they asked. Their captives found themselves stripped, stolen from, and dehumanized all for the pleasure and at the whim of the Nazi forces. The dehumanization done by the Nazis shows heavily in the book Night, mainly during the parts where the Nazis forced the Jewish people to strip and shower, selections, and in the end when Elizer sees his reflection after his camp was liberated.

Sentenced to a life of persecution and cruel treatment for his beliefs, a young Jewish boy witnessed his fellow prisoners terrorized and their humanity stripped away by Nazis. Elie Wiesel watched as the Nazis starved, beat, and killed the Jews, and with that slowly deprived the Jews of any empathy or compassion to the point of Jews turning on one another for the means of survival. Elie Wiesel’s Night demonstrates that violence leads to dehumanization as shown by man vs. society conflict, flashbacks, and imagery describing acts of brutality. Due to the man vs. society conflict in Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Jews were persecuted for their beliefs and sentenced to a life of violence that led to dehumanization of the Jews.

At this point, the Jews are very comfortable and go so far as to recognize

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, imagery is employed to show the dehumanization of the Jewish people by the Nazis as the Jews develop the “survival of the fittest” mentality, and as Eliezer looses the ability to express emotions. Wiesel uses imagery of the Jews’ “survival of the fittest” mentality to show the dehumanization of the Jews who are forced to endure treacherous conditions in the concentration camps. The enslaved Jews experience the worst forms of inhumane treatment. Pushed beyond their ability to deal with the oppressing starvation, cold, disease, exhaustion, and cruelty, the Jews lose their sanity and morality. Thus, Wiesel refers to the Jews as, “wild beasts of prey with animal hatred

In “night” we see how the Jewish people are being oppressed and dehumanized in so many ways. One example is “I became A-7713. From now on, I had no other name” (PG.42). This quote shows how they were stripped of their identities and replaced it with a simple number. As if they were just a number on a sheet of paper. We see in the book how the Nazis only see the Jewish people as numbers and had no knowledge of their actual lives or their identities. They are also given such little amounts of food,

Dehumanization Imagine being considered and treated as less than human. You no longer have your human rights- perhaps your house is taken away, or you are forcibly relocated. Or maybe, your freedom and your identity are taken away from you. You are no longer treated like a person, now more like an animal. These cruel acts of dehumanization are present frequently in the novel, Night by Elie Wiesel.

Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place as the tyrant Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Nazis targeted the Jews' humanity, and slowly dissolved their feeling of being human. This loss of humanity led to a weakened will in the Holocaust victims, and essentially led to death in many. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, theft of possessions, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, and much more. There is no greater loss than that of humanity, so one can never truly relate to the horrors of dehumanization the Jews faced. In the list below, I will compile various examples that correlate to this theme of dehumanization.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about a man in the concentration camp, “He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized”, and this only reveals how sadistic people were. Dehumanization is as plain-spoken as denying food and water to someone, denying social connection or limiting someone's ability to sleep. People who had suffered did not get any freedom and it was a life filled with torment and misery. Night is written by Elie Wiesel and it is a memoir. Through the process of dehumanization, including treating the Jews like animals, taking away their identity and being denied justice that Hitler and his accomplices were able to break the will of millions of Jewish people and largely succeed with their fiendish and diabolic

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.