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The Holocaust : Examples Of Dehumanization In The Holocaust

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Dehumanization in the Holocaust Throughout the duration of the Holocaust numerous tragedies transpired. Among these tragedies was dehumanization, the process by which Nazis gradually reduced the humanity of the Jewish population. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, Elie depicts the dehumanization he experienced and the devastating effect it had on his life while on the transports to Auschwitz, again in the concentration camps, then finally and perhaps worst of all, on his father’s death bed.
One of the first examples of dehumanization that occurs in Wiesel’s memoir is when he depicts the transport that takes him and his family from their beloved home of Sighet, Romania, all the way to Auschwitz. When Wiesel writes “We walked towards the station, where a convoy of cattle cars was waiting. The Hungarian Police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one. They handed us some bread, a few pails of water,” (Wiesel 22) it is shown that human beings were forced not onto a passenger train, but into cattle cars as if they were nothing more than livestock. As if cattle cars were not demeaning enough the Jewish prisoners are fed bread and given water in pails, reinforcing the idea that they are merely livestock. This is only the first example of how the Nazi’s began to plant the idea, in the mind of the Jews, that they were less than human. Unfortunately, it did not stop there, the Jews continually faced dehumanization during the Holocaust.
Once the Nazi’s began treating

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