Night Dehumanization Examples

    One of the biggest examples of dehumanization in WWII was Hitler himself. Essentially everything that Hitler did while he was in power, dehumanized the Jews. To begin, Hitler started out making the Jewish people wear star badges that alienated them from normal society. “Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear a yellow star.” (Wiesel 11). This quote is from the novel and explains that the Jews started to wear the badges. The novel continues to tell how the Jewish people were very afraid of this change, and they should have been because then came the ghettos. “Two ghettos were created in Sighet.” “The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear.” (Wiesel 11). This illustrates the unsettling situation the Jewish people were in because they were being caged in like animals. They were not even afraid of the barbed wire around their small community. The

The first example of dehumanization is when Elie, his father, and seventy eight other Jews get put in the cattle car. The German in charge of the cattle car says, “ ‘If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot like dog’s’ ”(Wiesel 24). The Jews are humans and don't need to be treated like this because there scared and just got out of the ghettos.

“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 Night a memoir by Elie Wiesel, he uses imagery, simile, and connotation to demonstrate the effects of dehumanization and what affect it has on people.

“Night” by Elie Wiesel explains how dehumanization occurred during a weak point in human history.

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.

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.

Dehumanization was a big part of the book night. Dehumanization had a big impact on Elie, it destroyed the person he once was. “The child I was, had been consumed. All that was left was a shape that resembled me” (Wiesel 37). Elie is showing how he was being dehumanized. Another person that was affected by dehumanization was Elie’s father, his father no longer looks like the same person anymore.

An example of the Jews being tortured by the Nazi guards would be on page 37 when Elie’s father gets struck across the face.“I did not move. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, before my very eyes, and I had not flicked an eyelid.”(Wiesel 37). Elie doesn’t react because he has become emotionally numb to the horrific things happening to him. Being desensitized makes the prisoners turn into animals and do things that they would not do under normal circumstances. On page 101 people are throwing bread into the cattle cars where the prisoners are being transferred to another camp. The prisoners kill each other in order to get the bread because they have become like hungry animals. An old man on a cattle car grabbed a piece of bread and decided to hide it so the others wouldn't notice. A man did see the old man take the bread and started beating him. It was the old man’s son that was killing him for the food. “Meir. Meir, my boy! Don’t you recognize me? I’m your father…you’re hurting me…you’re killing your father! I’ve got some bread…for you too…for you too….” (Wiesel 101). Before the holocaust none of the prisoners would have killed their own father but because they have been so dehumanized they will do anything to survive. The prisoners lose their humanity and faith in their religion because of the way they are treated by the SS

In the book “Night” it shows another way of dehumanization by Nazis hitting the Jewish with batons. . “The Kapos were beating us again, I no longer felt the pain.” (Wiesel 36) Even later on in the book it shows many examples of them being beaten because the Nazis find joy in it. This proves that the Jews accepted their fate and were “programmed” to be slaves and were used to the pain. “I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip… Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel 57) This shows how Elie accepts his role as creature in the concentration

Dehumanization is the torture that the Jews receive and the pity they do not. It is found everywhere in the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, but also in the whole thinking process and execution of the Holocaust. The population of Jews is abruptly being reduced because of some unnecessary hatred towards them. Elie is surrounded by death, hunger, and suffering, and all he comes to know is pain. To demean a whole race and create another period of slavery leaves an aftertaste of abhorrence and loathing that Jewish people still feel today, but it also leaves a trail of shame for all to endure. Dehumanization leads many people too their downfall, loss of faith, and realizing theirs and others true human nature.

Throughout the chilling memoir Night by Elie Wiesel we see a multitude of horrifying scenes. Elie was, in this book, tortured by the crushing actions of Nazi Germany. The entire Jewish population of Germany was targeted by Nuremberg laws created by Adolf Hitler, and each law aimed to dehumanize the Jews in one way or another. Elie Wiesel and other Jews were first labelled with yellow stars, then numbered, and by the end of it, they could barely recognize themselves. Chapter 6 page 83 says “We had forgotten everything-death, fatigue, our natural needs…., condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.” This quote exhibits dehumanization mainly in two words; “... mere numbers,...” These people were no longer people, they

Dehumanization played a big role in the holocaust the Nazis reduced the Jews from living human beings to objects and numbers. “Night” by Elie Wiesel published in 1958. In the novel “Night” is about Elie and his time in a concentration camp and how he survived the holocaust. Being separated from his mother and sisters and only left with his father.Dehumanization the process in which the Nazis reduced the Jews from people to objects and numbers.

Ideas behind Night “Anyone can cook”-Ratatouille, coincides with some of the ideas from the novel Night, written by Elie Weisel. Night was woven with the connecting ideas of: Dehumanization, Elie’s personal struggles with identity, and the authors purpose. Not one other point in history yet contains as much horror or hardship as the holocaust. As painful as some of these ideas are to communicate, ignorance would cost humanity more dehumanization.

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.