Loss Of Individuality In Night Elie Wiesel

On the cattle car back from Auschwitz, Wiesel describes the prisoners as being beasts of prey, almost like the Holocaust has destroyed their humanity and transformed them into animals: “Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other. Beasts of prey unleashed, animal hate in their eyes...the spectators observed these emacipated creatures ready to kill for a crust of bread” (Wiesel 101). This quote mainly serves as a device to express prisoners as being animals, but also describes the role of a bystander. The Holocaust was a period of time full of passive bystanders who didn’t do anything despite having full knowledge of what was occurring in the concentration camps. The unnamed spectators in this quote symbolize all of the people that turned a blind eye once they figured out what the Nazis were truly doing to jewish and other “lesser” populations. In addition, in the last line of the memoir, Wiesel sees himself in a mirror for the first time since he had left his ghetto. Wiesel describes himself in the third person as being a corpse, displaying the immense toll that the Holocaust has had on certain people: “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he

The appeal to emotion is the strongest by far. It seems almost impossible for a reader not to cry at the words of Wiesel. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. His vivid description of a child being hanged, how he was still alive, “struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes”, truly captures the ghastly occurrences of the death camp. His own discussion of how he had lost faith in a God, and how other sons were leaving or even beating their fathers with no care enlightens the reader to the true despair that surrounded the people that inhabited these camps. Also, his description of himself in a mirror as “a corpse” that “gazed back at me” installs in the reader the overwhelming sense of how this event so completely ravaged the human soul.

In 1944, World War II was close to over, but not for everyone. Six million Jewish people had been taken from their homes and put to the most dehumanizing work in history by being transported to concentration camps to work 12+ hour shifts. With little to no food, complete segregation, and torturous treatment by sadistic guards, this time of life was a literal hell for these Jews. The SS guards stationed there were so brutal, that the prisoners felt constantly in fear for their lives. In the award winning memoir, Night, written by Elie Wiesel, he narrates his experience as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust. At the concentration camps, they were separated and put to work, not office work, interminable amounts of forced labor, no mistakes, and if so, shot or beaten to death. The Nazis decimated the Jewish population, and in doing so, exposed Hitler’s true intentions and cruelty. Wiesel discloses the radical changes that the Jews undergo, from normal people, with family and friends, into violent, self-centered crazies who look out for no one else and must fight for

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.

Suffering. Pain. Misery. Death. All the negative thoughts in human minds, many that we never want to face. Pain can take a toll on you, physically and mentally. Yet, imagine someone facing those hardships in reality, what if it was reality that we never wanted to face; so we pushed it to its limits? Elie Wiesel was one of the many to face this tragic reality in Auschwitz, in the Concentration Camps, during the Holocaust...The pain of the Holocaust, the suffering of being ripped apart from your loved ones, to the mental and physical scars left by not only the S.S officers; but the horrors seen from the eyes of the purest souls. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie opens up the locked chest in his heart to tell us the horrifying experience that brought many to tears, otherwise known as The Concentration Camps and how it completely transformed Elie into a new person.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night displays how the traumatic effects of the Holocaust shaped his identity, as it caused him to lose hope in humanity and goodness in the world due to loss of faith. An individual is greatly impacted by their identity as it can shape how others view them, their moral beliefs and how they reflect upon themselves. Those perceptions of Elie are altered by the intense punishments and orders the Nazi officers have on the captured Jewish. Wiesel is stripped of his rights and punished for his Jewish faith, which triggers the changes in his identity and turns into a lifeless prisoner. After seeing many of his fellow prisoners be killed or beaten, Elie undergoes a crisis of faith and God because seeing those events often causes mental stress.

Night, by Elie Wiesel, shares the terrifying power of a first-hand account of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was taken from his home in 1944, to Auschwitz, and then Buchenwald. Immediately, he was exposed to the brutalities he would face for a full year. One of them being, dehumanization. Nazi’s made conscious efforts to dehumanize the Jews. Although it started as the Jews not being able to own their personal belongings, through the progression of the Holocaust the Jews found themselves being stripped of their dignity. The Jews eventually were not even call by name, but were referred to by a number, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattoo numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (Wiesel, 42)

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night screaming because whenever you close your eyes images of the horrifying past haunt your dreams. Elie Wiesel writes in his book Night about his memories of when he was taken along with his family by Nazi’s in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Buchenwald. The book is full of ups and downs as Elie and his dad experience conflict after conflict throughout their time in concentration camps. Throughout the text one can easily see that Elie showed how inhumanity can injure the human mind through imagery, tone and through paradoxes. One way Elie shows inhumanity can injure the human mind is through imagery.

His personality is changing. Elie also deals with constant beatings and witnesses terrible actions taken on other human beings that no one should see. This would harden anyone and turn them into a brute. Elie also shows his changed personality in the final chapters of the novel. Elie is looking for his father in the final camp and says “only if I didn’t find him, what a relief it would be”. Even though later Elie feels ashamed for his evil thoughts, he again shoes a brute characteristic. He is portraying that it would be much easier to survive in the camp without his father being a nuisance and burden to him. The events that Elie witnessed shaped him into a brute. Dehumanization is also a constant theme in Night, a prime example of this is when they arrive at the camps, “Men to the left, women to the right”. In this quote they treat them as if they were a heard of animals being lead to a slaughter house, these were women and children and loved ones being split up permanently. Another example in the book is when the Jews in the camps came across the crematoriums. “A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children.

The author wanted to show how inhumane the camps were by describing how the Nazis made them watch a child suffer from being hung. “For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive” (Wiesel 71-72). This quote shows how brutal the Nazis can be when it comes to the Jews. The Nazis made the other Jews watch a child that they all loved so much suffer a horrible death. This was extremely inhumane and cruel to make the Jews watch him suffer, but that was not all that the Nazis did to them relating to that. The Nazis never treated them like human beings, they acted like they could treat the Jews like animals. When Wiesel is on his journey to one of the camps, he has to run the most part of it and the SS officer has no intention of cutting anyone any slack just because they are tired. In the memoir it says “The SS made us increase our pace. ‘Faster, you swine, you filthy sons of bitches!’” (Wiesel 91). The SS officer calls the Jews swine here while they are running which shows his atrocity toward them, and it also shows the Nazis cruelty toward the Jews. The Jews are worn down and tired but the Nazis make them keep

Finally the most dehumanizing and degrading tactic employed by the S.S Officers was treating the prisoners like animals. An example of them being treated like animals occurs at the station where the Jews of Sighet are being liquidated to the trains to Auschwitz by the Hungarian Guards The Jews were crammed in the synagogue before that, causing discomfort to many. Elie gives us a glimpse into history through this quote, “The Hungarian Police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each car. They handed us some bread, a few pails of water. They checked the bars on the windows to make sure they would not come loose. The cars

During the Holocaust, approximately six million non-Aryans, especially Jews, perished under the rule of the Nazis. Prisoners were frequently beaten, starved, and treated as if they were animals. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he recollects the traumatizing experiences he and his fellow prisoners

Hate begins to grow, and in the case of the Holocaust, this incessant hatred led to the identification of all Jews, the deportation of millions of people from their homes, the concentration in the camps, and extermination of entire families and communities at once. For nearly a decade, Jews, prisoners-of-war, homosexuals, and the disabled were rounded up, sent off to camps, and systematically slaughtered in unimaginably inhumane ways. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, shares his experiences at Auschwitz in the book Night, which reveals the true extent of inhumanity in both the Nazis and the Jews. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Wiesel uses imagery of his experiences before and while being in the concentration camp in order to develop his theme of dehumanization of both the Jews and the Nazis during the Holocaust.

This was as a last resort for the Nazis to stay in control of the prisoners as the resistance grew near the camp. As these cattle passed through the German towns, the workers of the town through scraps of food at the prisoners as if they were zoo animals. Those aboard the train fought like rabid animals over the scarce scraps. The workers continued to throw scraps as a source of entertaining. Wiesel writes, “Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The workers watched the spectacle with great interest.”(100). This excerpt demonstrates the dehumanization of the Jewish prisoners. It shows how the deprivation of food has led them to act like animals out of desperation to survive.

In this scene from Night, Elie Weisel writes about the ways the Germans treat the prisoners when they arrive at Auschwitz. In this scene, Weisel teaches his reader how the Germans brutalize their prisoners. Weisel describes the Germans as “beating” the prisoners repeatedly and forcing them into “disinfection,” this is similar to how one wouuld treat an object or animal, not a human being. This reflects the brutalizing of the prisoners. Elie writes about how as the prisoners were running they “threw” clothes at them and in that moment they had “ceased to be men”. Weisel also writes about how Meir Katz, “wore a child’s pants” and how Stern, was “floundering in a huge jacket.” The Nazis did not give the prisoners the proper clothes and threw the