The Bystander Effect In Night By Elie Wiesel

The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel showed me that people will use self-preservation in drastic times. Jews were friendly people who helped each other out before they went through the traumatic experience. Once in camp they became more reserved and started to think about themselves and only their survival, not caring who they had to pass through. In camp there were no friends and no

First, criminals or people who hurt others on purpose shouldn’t expect to receive human rights. In the novel, Night by Elie Wiesel, the author retells stories of when he was a victim of the holocaust. In this book, he tells a story of a Jewish woman screaming that she saw a fire whilst on a train to the concentration camps. The other passengers were getting annoyed, so they tried to stop the woman.

If I were her, I probably would not have tried to help anyone, but only seclude myself to preserve my survival. Another situation that stood out was where a pipel being hung led to the “soup tasting like corpses”, but just a page before, the hanging of a youth from Warsaw led to Elie finding the soup “excellent that evening” (Wiesel. 70,72). What confuses me is that both were youths, but only the pipel’s death was grimaced at. Did the Jewish people’s stay at Auschwitz really change their moralities so

In his memoir “Night”, Elie Wiesel gives his account of events that took place during the holocaust. Historical records confirm that the holocaust was an undesirable experience for the victims who had to go through physical torture. In his memoir, Wiesel gives gruesome accounts of the different threats prisoners faced at the Nazi concentration camp. Clearly, the psychological threats seemed to wear the prisoners down more than the physical ones, nevertheless, the prisoners adopted physical unresponsiveness and emotional numbness to protect themselves from both threats, however, Wiesel carefully selected the two execution scenes to strengthen the pathos of his memoir, and to show that sometimes even emotional numbness fails to shield one from

“The child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes”(Wiesel 65). This is when the child possessed weapons and got the death penalty with two other people. The book Night is a memoir about Elie Wiesel going to a concentration camp with his father and other Jews from his neighborhood during the Holocaust. He writes about what happened when he was in the camps under control of the Nazis. The Perils of Indifference speech that Elie Wiesel talked about how he was thanking the American soldiers saved him. He also talks about all of the people were indifferent in the 1900’s and how America knew what was going on but waited to free the Jews from the Nazis. Night delivered Elie Wiesel’s message better than Perils of Indifference because it explained more of what was going on.

Not yet exposed to the horrors of the concentration camp, Elie enters Birkenau with his innate senses of compassion and altruism intact. Soon after his arrival, Elie witnesses the burning of children, women, and men alike. In response to this horrific sight, Elie becomes doubtful of the reality of this situation and questions, "How was it possible… that the world kept silent?" (32). As seen in the creation of Night and this question, for Elie, silence is unthinkable. At this point, Elie still holds faith in the power that people hold. However, the only hope to save these people from their fates is if the silence breaks. Along with this thinking, his tone of disbelief contributes to Elie's demonstration of one of man's most primitive instinct: compassion. This compassion is still strong in Elie—for if this was false, why would he have questioned this so passionately? However, after submitting to oppression from the concentration camps' officials, Elie's

He was finally free, no joy filled his heart but abandonment was drowning it. How dangerous is indifference to humankind as it pertains to suffering and the need for conscience understanding when people are faced with unjust behaviors? Elie Wiesel is an award winning author and novelist who has endured and survived hardships. One of the darkest times in history, a massacre of over six million Jews, the Holocaust and Hitler himself. After the Holocaust he went on and wrote the internationally acclaimed memoir “Night,” in which he spoke out against persecution and injustice across the world. In the compassionate yet pleading speech, ¨Perils of Indifference,¨ Elie Wiesel analyzes the injustices that himself and others endured during the twentieth century, as well as the hellish acts of the Holocaust through effective rhetorical choices.

Evil is like a roaring fire in the woods: the longer it's left roaming free, the more damage it causes. In Night by Elie Wiesel, he tells the true evils he faced during the Holocaust. The events that occurred at the time not only showed the sickening hearts of the Nazi's but also unveiled the dark part of the human mind. If one senses evil assembling around them, intervening is a task they must face. When immorality is taking place, there are two sides: the cause and the effect.

Eliezer remembered a situation of a German stranger making a gesture of help: “A worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon” (Wiesel 100). The man who threw the bread felt safe to do so because he was not in any danger if someone saw. Giving up the bread cost him very little, and he remained safe throughout the whole process. The worker was able to become an ally because he did not feel at risk. For the Jewish people in the concentration camps, standing up to officers would mean that they would also be targeted. When Eliezer’s father was hit by a German officer, he didn’t do anything. Fear prevented him from coming to his father’s aid (Wiesel 39). If Eliezer had stepped in, he knew there would be significant repercussions for him. Eliezer chose not to be an ally because he felt that the need to protect himself was greater than the need to protect his

A quote from Albert Einstein states “the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything”. As difficult as it is to describe the terrible deeds of those who were part of the Holocaust, it is true that those who did nothing are at fault just as much as those who carried out the actions. When one thinks of the Holocaust today it is difficult to picture that such events were done by human beings. Societies have advanced but it is important to acknowledge the reason as to why many bystanders refused to help or why they were so indifferent to the pain felt by the Jews. “The psychological mechanisms used to come to terms with the suffering of another appear to be very similar, whether the person is standing right before us or is 2,000 miles away. (Barnet:118) Barnett explains that ideological and moral principles also come into play, as do self-interest and the weighing of the possible consequences of our actions. We try to establish what is or is not possible. In the end, our decision will be determined not so much by whether we actually have the power to change a situation, but whether we have the will to do so. (Barnett, 118). In the case of many of the individuals who chose to become bystanders rather than change the situation they were not willing to get involved. Although not every German was a bystander, those who

In the world during the time of the Holocaust, there was indifference towards the suffering of millions of Jews. When individuals reflect about the Holocaust, the majority of the time the responsibility of the terrible events is placed upon the perpetrators. However, bystanders and witnesses indirectly affected the victims of the Holocaust as well. The silence of these people played one of the largest roles in the Holocaust, they influenced it by avoiding any type of involvement and by becoming blinded towards the suffering of others. In his Academy Award acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel says, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. This exert from his speech reveals the importance of the role that bystanders played in the

The 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln once stated “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power” (“Too Much Power Qoutes” AZ Quotes). Under the leadership of Adolph Hitler, the Nazi Party tore away the basic rights of human beings based upon the belief of anti-semitism. People of Jewish faith were persecuted to unimaginable limits, and their normal everyday lives were changed for forever. Article Five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (United Nations General Assembly). Throughout Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night, Elie and his family are violated of this right as a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

The bystander effect is when people choose to stand by when they could help or provide assistance for those in need. It is usually link with the amount of people, the more people, the less likely they are to help. The people often believe that someone else will help and they should not get involved.

Would one help some random person on the street in need? What if they were out in the frigid cold with no home or warm clothes? How about if the person was a woman getting physically harassed by her boyfriend? Most people would say “yes” to these questions, but would they actually help if any of these situations occurred in their lives? “The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present.” (Bystander Effect). Why is it that people do not help those in need? Isn’t that our duty as good citizens to help those in need? “The reason why people do not help those in need is because they believe somebody else will do something first.” (Heroic Imagination Project). This paper will cover the freezing child exercise, the New York City stabbing incident, and the physical abuse between a guy to a girl observation. All three different experiments will display the bystander effect in action with real people. These procedure will present the true faces of our society and expose the real heroes who would actually help those in need. The Bystander Effect causes people to stand by a misbehavior or a person in need presented by the procedure of the experiments, the results of the incident, and the reasoning for their actions.

The bystander effect is a social psychological scenario where a person who is in an urgent situation is not given any help by the people around due to the discourage from the presence of others (whatispsychology.biz, 2017). Social psychologists, John Darley and Bibb Latane, introduced the bystander effect in the 1960s after the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young woman who was stabbed to death outside her home in New York City. It took her attacker more than half an hour to kill her, and during that time, thirty-eight people saw her being murdered, and they did nothing to help her. “The responsibility for helping was diffused among the observers” (Darley & Latane, 1968).