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Prejudice In The Book Night By Elie Wiesel

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Conquered By Prejudice
"Systematic desensitization" is a method of conditioning the human mind to be less fearful. This means that the more someone is exposed to something, the less likely they are to be affected by what once scared them. Systematic desensitization has negative effects when one becomes so numb to his or her surroundings that the person stops thinking about what is truly frightening. When a person is no longer compassionate and has un-human reactions to violence, he or she is desensitized beyond repair. Most people were deadened to brutality in Elie Wiesel’s book Night. This novel demonstrates that prejudice dehumanizes both the perpetrators and victims.
The perpetrators, or Nazis, and the victims in Night were dehumanized when …show more content…

The Jews in the Holocaust watched their families and loved ones get slaughtered every day, leading the victims to become numb and indifferent to what was going on around them. Elie began to lose hope after seeing so much cruelty and thought, “Indifference deadened the spirit. Here or elsewhere- what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was so long and never ending” (93). Elie gave up hope in himself, which is just as lethal as an angry Nazi, for truly believing you are incapable of something is the most belittling and dehumanizing thought of all. Not only did the Jews become numb to the violence, but the belief that it was wrong to act out violently against the Jews never crossed the Nazis’ minds. After routinely murdering numerous Jews who were “un-human” in the minds of the Nazis and Germans, the perpetrators began to believe with every fiber in their beings that what they were doing was for the world’s benefit. One day in the camps, …show more content…

The Jews, whose only identifications were the tattoos on their arms, felt like unwanted vermin who were unworthy of the air Germans breathed. It was easier for Nazis to view the Jews and prisoners in the concentration camps as less human because, aside from the numbers inked in their arms, the prisoners no longer possessed differentiating human characteristics. Elie knew what he had to do when he observed, “Dr. Mengele was holding a list: our numbers… I had but one thought: not to have my number taken down and not to show my left arm” (72). Elie knew his number needed to be hidden or else it could become his worst enemy. The Nazis were not the only ones to think of the Jews as number-labeled bodies. Jewish prisoners let go of their passions from their previous lives and took on the identities of mere digits. Elie observed a boy who still had a passion for playing an instrument in the concentration camp, “ I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek’s soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings- his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future” (90). Finding someone who still had hobbies from before the Holocaust was rare, and Elie knew this when he took special notice of Juliek’s form of self-expression. Both

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