The Common Theme Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

    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

In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, Wiesel writes about the experiences of Eliezer, his family, and fellow Jews, he explained how the Nazis gradually changes the way the Jews lived little by little. Dehumanization is the process of stripping a person of every quality that makes him human and changing them to fit their needs. Dehumanizing started when Eliezer and other Jews in his community are evacuated from their homes in Sighet. They were transported in cattle cars which related the Jews to no more than livestock. After the harsh transportation the Jews arrived at Auschwitz a concentration camp where Eliezer spent many months of his life. They were whipped, ran, and starved till some of the Jews could not take it. In Elie Wiesel book he explains how he found the stamina to survive these cruel conditions.

There are many times one can see the Nazi’s brutalizing the Jews throughout the novel. From the moment the Nazi’s took the Jews as prisoners they were being mistreated. They were loaded into cattle cars, a vehicle made to transport animals, to the point where they were so full people could hardly breathe. They were sent to concentration camps where they were tortured and treated as slaves. As they entered the camps they were humiliated, SS officers yelled at them to “‘Strip! Hurry up! Raus! Hold on only to your belt and your shoes”(Wiesel 35). They were sent to cold showers and bathed in a sulfur-scented soap to be identifiable by their scent. They received only one small ration of food a day, these people were starved. Not only were they cared for like a group of worthless animals but some were never even given a chance.

(109) The Jews by lose their faith in their god when the Germans hung a little boy, and he was dangling there struggling to die, and a Jew next to Elie said “where is god when this boy is suffering?” Elie said back to the man “God is here, he is hanging from the ropes” ( 90) As a result Elie loses faith in hs god. Inhumanity and cruelty were shown when the Jews were stripped of their identity, hair, jewelry, and shoes. The Germans stripped the Jews of everything because they did not want to have individuality among the Jews in the camps. The Germans gave the Jews numbers that were tattooed on the arms so they could be kept up with. It is almost like in prison how they have numbers so they do not get mixed up or lost track of. Once they had numbers the Jews were told to go to the barracks and they were given striped blue and white uniforms. This was also savage because it was the middle of winter. The Jews wore very little clothing causing some Jews to die from the cold and

Throughout the duration of the Holocaust, many Jews witnessed the worst of humanity. In concentration camps, over six million people were killed and tortured. Among the people imprisoned in these camps was Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. In his memoir Night, the many acts of dehumanization and cruelty that Wiesel witnesses ultimately leads to his loss of faith in both his god and humanity.

Without the basic needs, which the Jews were deprived of, the Jews could’ve died. Another example of an event which dehumanized them was how the SS officers whipped the Eliezer, his father, and his fellow Jews and physically hurt them. A third example of an event which dehumanized them was when the Nazis forced the Jews to perform hard labor for several hours each day. This probably caused many Jews to get sick due to lack

He slapped my father with such a force that he fell down",(Night39). His father was being treated like an animal. Other jews were dehumanized by shaving their heads, being abused and even killed at times. "we had been a hundred or so in a train, only twelve of us left it",(Night106). All jews were dehumanized by eliminating them.

The novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel is set in 1944 during the world war two era, and Elie and his family are taken by Germans from their home in Sighet to various concentration camps where they experience many traumatizing events. Elie and his family are first taken to a German concentration camp in Auschwitz, where a German soldier separates the men from the women. Elie is unaware of the fact that this would be the last time he would ever see his mother. All the Jews and prisoners, including Elie, are treated horribly at these camps and struggle to survive and pass selection, a process that sends the weak to a crematorium where they are burned to death. In addition, selections are a common reoccurrence at Auschwitz and both men need to keep their

Dehumanization is the act of taking away someones identity. The Nazi's and SS officials would make the Jews wear a star to symbolize that they are a Jew. The Nazi's would also shave off the hairs from the Jews and use the hair to sell it. Lastly, the Nazi's or SS officials would make the Jews wear the same stripped clothes and the Jews had to wear it every single day. On winters, the Jewish people did not have much to cover themselves up except their stripped clothes. They would not be given much to eat either, just a bowl of soup and bread. Overall the Jews suffered and got their humanity taken away by

The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of their physiological needs. Elie and his father were deprived of food, water, and shelter. Elie describes the camp as “The camp looked as though it had been through an epidemic: empty and dead” (47). The people of the camp were so deprived of food the looked as though they were dead. Mr.

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.

The Nazis’ racism often discouraged them from excessive cruelty, we were fated to die as the lesser race, the less we were viewed as humans, the less there was a point in humiliation. However, the process of killing Jews could not escape humiliation. By inflicting pain the Nazis acknowledged our humanity which angered them even further, it was our bitter victory leading to death. The Germans’ process included dehumanizing Jews up to the killing moment, the ideology claimed to torture Jews seeking them to accept their inhumanity, not for humiliation, but to cleanse their souls before being burned alive (5). Convincing Jews to admit to their own inhumanity was to assert the Nazis in what they already believed, and give justification for torment and murder. The Germans’ attitude toward death had the Holocaust combine humiliation and destruction, the Germans saw themselves as the cleansing power, which made their actions even more horrifying. I could not predict their actions, it was their unpredictability that made them terrible in their behavior, the only thing truly predictable was killing Jews which was a direct result of the Nazi ideology. Jews misinterpreted and misunderstood Nazi intentions, such misunderstanding was encouraged because it fed the chaos and horror amongst the prisoners and gave power

The German society was very wicked towards the Jews. There was a hidden reason behind the Nazis moving the Jews from camp to camp, separating their families, and beating or killing any Jews who make a mistake. “The evidence shows that in the early days of their accession to power, the Nazis in Germany set out to build a society in which there simply would be no more room for Jews.” (Wiesel, viii) They also state that, “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.” (Wiesel, viii) This shows just how badly the Nazis wanted to kill the Jews. They made them work and then decided to kill them off. In the end they got their wish when “while watching their friends and neighbors fall dead all around them,” when there were many who started dying off. (Wiesel) The whole purpose for their mistreatment towards the Jews was because they simply didn’t want them there. They wanted to be ruler over them and their population.

The dehumanization begins when it is declared that all people of Jewish faith must wear a Star of David on their arm. This is an act of dehumanization because it takes away the people’s right to privacy and forces them to parade their religion and life style around for the rest of the world to see. As well when their businesses are all shut down, the Jewish people must resort to buying and selling items on the black market in secret. This takes all the dignity out of making a living and gaining the necessities for life. Another extremely dehumanizing action of the Nazi soldiers is how they choose certain Jewish people to watch over and control the rest of the group with the threat that the leaders would be punished if anyone stepped out of line. This is incredibly dehumanizing because it creates an atmosphere for jealousy, rivalry, and forces some people to become corrupt for their own

One way they dehumanized was by taking away all of the Jews’ identity. This happened when they first arrived at the first camp.The Nazis took away things that made up who they were such as giving them