One Survivor Remembers Film Analysis

During the Holocaust, people in the Nazi’s custody were treated as less than human. According to “Jakob’s Story”, the Nazi’s gave their prisoners little food and only one meal a day. Jakob writes “we ate one meal a day and it consisted of soup with potato peels; scraps of food from the SS” (Blankitny, paragraph 17). Here one can see that the Nazi’s looked down upon their prisoners and treated them as less than

    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

Dehumanization is when one people group is viewed as subhuman to another people group. The Nazis did everything they could to degrade and dehumanize the Jewish people. When the Jewish people were deported, they were shoved into cattle cars for days long trips with little food, air, or water. All of their personal belongings were stripped from them. The prisoners were shaved bald and referred to only by their assigned numbers, never their real name (Wiesel 22-42). This was all an attempt to dehumanize the Jewish people, making them nothing but a number. On the other hand, the Ukrainians were considered traitors to the Soviet Union and placed below the people of Russia. The blame was placed on the Ukrainian peasants’ shoulders when there was a shortage of grain. Vladimir Lenin, the predecessor of Joseph Stalin wrote a tirade against the kulaks, calling them “bloodsuckers” and “plunderers” (source 1). Although both the Jews and the Kulaks were dehumanized and not seen as citizens of the country they lived in, the dehumanization process was different for

Another way the Germans dehumanized the Jews was by taking away all of their belongings. Some of these items they could live without, but they definitely did not realize how much they took them for granted. Lastly, the Jews were given numbers instead of their names. As the novel claimed, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). This act of taking away the Jews names and replacing them with numbers is an inhumane act which is dehumanizing towards them. People do not realize that something as simple as a name can have so much meaning until it is taken away. Therefore, the Germans stripped the Jews of everything that resembled a past life, which was dehumanizing.

How were the Jews dehumanized by the Nazis? The Nazis dehumanized the Jews through depriving them of basic human needs, individuality, and by treating them like animals. Elie Wiesel, surviver of the Holocaust, explains dehumanization in his autobiography Night. Night takes its reader through an amazing realization of how the people changed from civilized humans to vicious and animal-like. Each event that happens to Elie and the Jews, strips away pieces of their humanity. The Nazis dehumanize the Jews by robing them of their beloved possessions.

Not only were Jewish prisoners treated like animals the Nazi’s also vocally told them how worthless they were. The Jews were told that they were going to be treated like animals by the Nazi’s. For example, while the eighty imprisoned Jews

The Nazis’s dehumanized the jews by depriving them of basic human needs like family. When families first get to the camp the men and women, brothers and sisters, fathers and sons get separated from each other. The separation of families is shown on page 29 when an SS officer commanded, “Men to the left!

One of the methods of dehumanization was separating families.”Men to the left, women to the right”(29). Hitler didn’t care about how the Jews felt. Jews were treated like force breeding farms for animals. They did not have a lot of food and bad living conditions. “The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions”(29). Jews weren’t considered humans and so they didn’t get to have human like possessions. Everything they owned was just taken away from them and they never got to see it again.

Dehumanization can be broken down quite simple, ironically. The Nazi’s tore down people by taking away their unwritten rights as people. People tend to identify themselves in many ways, such as “that who they are”. The Nazi’s were able to take this part away the fastest. As soon as the prisoners got taken to the concentration camps, they were given a shower, stripped of their clothing, given ill-fitting, worn down clothes, shaved their heads, took their

The Nazis weren’t the only people who treated Jews like inferior beings; anybody who has the power can treat anything lower than themselves. “…a present whose abnormality suddenly becomes routine.”(Langer 6). The gypsy considered himself as the superior of the group so he could strike anybody he wants (Wiesel 39). When the gypsy’s life becomes too important for him, he has adopted to the way of the Nazis. As the Allied forces advanced, the Nazis led death marches as their last resort because they had concerns about their own lives. “...life becomes too much for man and death assuming the throne in the human imagination” (Langer 6). S.S made Jews run for hundreds of miles nonstop (Wiesel 85). They, the SS, were frightened that their cruel ways dug up, decided they had to bury the evidence which explained that they could not believe what the inhumane actions they engaged in with other people. People had the potential to manipulate other people in mass numbers but the second they think for themselves, they will find out what is right and what is not.

First of all, the Nazis were the main proponents in dehumanizing the Jews. To illustrate, there was “an infinitely long train, composed of roofless cattle cars, [and] the SS shoved [them] inside, a hundred per car…” (97). They Nazis were not concerned about the care and treatment of the Jews. The guards packed the prisoners inside the cattle cars as if they were a bunch of unnamed animals getting ready to go to the slaughterhouse, and the Jews eventually became those unnamed animals. Specifically, Eliezel “…became A-7713. From then on, [he] had no other name” (42). Names were quickly forgotten, and Jews only regarded to as their number. Even more, the now unnamed,

Beginning on January 30, 1933, the Holocaust had begun. 11 million people were killed during the Holocaust, and within the 11 million deaths 6 million of them were Jews; that means that more than half of the people who died due to this genocide were Jews. This genocide was also known as the Holocaust. Fortunately, this massive genocide ended on May 8, 1945. There are many other genocides, such as the Rwandan genocide that had 800,00 deaths and only lasted about 100 days. The most captivating one is the Holocaust because many people died and during the period of the Holocaust not a lot of people knew what was going on. There were many victims of the Holocaust, and most of which could not get help. The Nazis were able to get away with a massive number because they had a secret weapon called dehumanization. Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities. Many wonder how the Jewish population became dehumanized; circumstances such as propaganda, experimentations, and the Jews always being blamed for everything show how the Nazis dehumanized the Jews easily during the Holocaust.

Nazis slaughtered more than 5 million jews. Throughout the horrific slaughtering they kept many in a work camp, which they slowly took many things vital to them away. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel it shows how each thing they took away was an attempt at dehumanizing the jews. Whether that be their freedoms or bare necessities. Each one of these dehumanizing acts contributed to the death of 5 million jews.

The jews were also treated as animals the German soldiers had no respect over them because of what they believed in. The German soldiers used the jews for their entertainment they would make the jews fight over bread. “In the wagon where the bread had landed, a battle had ensued. Men were hurling themselves against each other, trampling, tearing at and mauling each other.” (Weisel. 101) They would have to hurt people they love because of the hunger they had.

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.