The Holocaust in Night by Ellie Wiesel Essay example

The nazis treated them as if they were nothing, and didn’t think twice about it. The Nazis didn’t even think of the Jews as human being; they treated them as trash, burned them alive, and treated them with no respect. As Elie and his dad first walked into the camp, they saw a sight they would never forget. “Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew

In the book, our narrator, Elie, is constantly going through changes, and almost all of them are due to his time spent in Auschwitz. Prior to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie was a very different boy, he had a more optimistic outlook on life. During the first few pages of the book, Elie tells us a bit about how he viewed the world before deportation, “ I was almost thirteen and deeply observant. By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple.” ( 3). Elie was, as he says himself, deeply observant and devoted most of his time to his faith. He spent almost all of his time studying and worshiping. At this point, Elie’s faith is the center of his life. Elie is also shown to do a few other things and has a few more early character traits aside from being dedicated to what he believes in. Elie also sees the best of people, a few pages later he says, “The news is terrible,’ he said at last. And then one word: ‘transports’ The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely… ‘Where will they take us?” (Wiesel 14). This is one of the only time we hear about Elie being worried or scared because of the Germans before Auschwitz, and still, despite the warnings that were given and the rumors circulating, Elie doesn’t think that the Germans are actually going to do all of those terrible things. Around this time in the book, Wiesel starts to become more emotionally weighted, but none of what has happened takes full effect until much later. There are multiple instances in the book where Elie is given reason to distrust or even hate the Germans, he talks about how the Gestapo treated him and his family on page 19 “‘Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!’ the Hungarian police were screaming.”. Yet he then goes on to say, on that very same page, that “Still our first

The genocide of a major Religion can bring out the good and the bad of people. “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir about when he was fifteen, and taken to Auschwitz, where his family was murdered. In “Night”,Wiesel shows Good people can be corrupted, whether it be through, propaganda, lies, or through violence.

Imagine you are taken away from all of your family, except for your father, at 15-years-old. You are forced into concentration camps, surviving hard working conditions and low food supply. And why you might ask? Because someone decided that your race determines what your future will be. But this is not a story of racism, it is a story of conformity. The SS officers listened to a leader, which some of these officers being Jews themselves. They had to kill or be killed. The Jewish peoples were weak and threatened, but frankly conforming was best for their situation. Elie Wiesel supports this through his experiences. In Night, Elie says “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” After surviving the Holocaust, Eliezer does just that. He was a witness for those who survived; He told those after him what happened in a first-hand account. In Night, Eliezer Wiesel shows how conformity is not always and bad thing, as sometimes it can save your life at times when individuality could get you killed.

The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of love. Elie, along with most of the other people in the camps, aren’t really accepted socially by anyone. They weren’t accepted as a person, and no one even knew them by their names; furthermore, they were known by the number they had tattooed on their arms. On page 42, Elie says “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” By having their names taken away, the Jewish people had their social acceptance stripped from them. Also, their families were taken away from them, and they had to do whatever they could to stay with them. As Elie said on page 30, “My hand tightened its grip on my father. All I could think of was not to lose him. Not to remain alone.” By separating the Jews from their families, they lost the love from them. By depriving the jews of social acceptance and their families, they hardly felt any

The Jews were the only ones who were persecuted during the holocaust. While Elie and his father were in the camp they were persecuted horrifically. When they first got to the (the first camps name) they stayed together everyday and every night. Elie was not going to let his father slip away that easy. Elie’s father did his best to take care of his son but it was very hard. Elie’s father would give him his rations. That is the kind of selfless love a father has for his son. Over the years Elie’s father began to grow weaker and it was an even more difficult time. One time Elie and his father had to lie about their age just so they could live and stay together. If the Jews did not do as they were told they were hit and sometimes even put in the cremation house. The Nazis did not have any sympathy towards the Jews and thats how Hitler liked it. Another type of propaganda used is fear. The Jews feared the Nazis every single day of their lives at the camps. All the Jews did not know when their day was coming, but knew it was coming soon. If some of the Jews were to old to work they were killed and so everyone tried to work as hard as they could no matter what age they were or how they felt. The nazis worked the Jews like dogs day in and day out. Elie feared not only for his life but also for his dads. Elie stuck with his dad till the end and it was well worth

One of Adolf Hitler’s promises was to eliminate the Jewish race. In order for this to happen, you must first see people as less than human. Once you have accomplished this task, the mass murder of millions of people becomes easy. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the multitude of times he was seen as less than human, and how this affected his life while in concentration camps. The dehumanization of the prisoners not only crushes them, it causes them to become desensitized and often see each other as less than human.

At the beginning of the memoir, Elie describes the extent of psychological abuse that he is subjected to, and already the reader can sense a theme of darkness. The atrocious cruelty showed by Nazi soldiers toward Jews, is beyond all realms of rationality. Through strategic verbal abuse, Nazi soldiers slowly deprive the Jews of their stimulus and ability to react. The author reveals, “Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog…The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us” (Wiesel 36). This daily psychological pressure is intended to extinguish any trace of humanity in Jews. The Nazi soldiers know that if they deprive the Jews of their innate nature and interests in life, it would be easier to instill fear and exponentially erase hope. The author affirms, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would had dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?” (39). In this section of the memoir, Elie underscores the Nazis’ success in creating a mental paralysis and an incapacity to react to injustice. The Nazis are using one of the most invasive forms of torture, the psychological abuse. They are progressing every day in their brutal plan, and consequently, the Jews’ anguish becomes more intense and precise. Caleb Lewis in

As the famous journalist Iris Chang once said, “As the Nobel Laureate warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” After experiencing the tragedies that occurred during the Holocaust, Eliezer Wiesel narrated “Night”. Eliezer wrote “Night” in an attempt to prevent something similar to the Holocaust from happening again, by showing the audience what the consequences are that come from becoming a bystander. Elie illustrated numerous themes by narrating the state of turmoil he was in during the Holocaust. In Night, Eliezer provided insight into what he experienced in order to teach the unaware audience about three themes; identity, silence, and faith.

Even though Eliezer was able to persevere, he was dehumanized by the Nazi’s in an atrocious and cold-blooded fashion. When a human is emotionally and physically stripped of their pride, it weakens his or her will to live. The Nazis targeted the Jews' humanity, and slowly dissolved their feeling of being an independant human. Elie Wiesel states “He took his time between lashes, only the first really hurt...twenty-four…twenty-five. It was over. I had not realized it but I had fainted.” (Wiesel 62). In the case of the Jews doing anything askew, they were to be punished in barbaric ways. This whipping by the Nazi’s had a drastic affect on Eliezer's identity, because before his punishment Eliezer had not yet altered his inquisitive mindset. Eliezer was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and as a result he was thrashed and trounced on by one of the German soldiers. This traumatized Eliezer and brought fear upon him, changing his attitude.

At the young age of 15, Elie was forcibly moved into a ghetto and soon after taken to a concentration camp. Human minds do not fully develop until a person reaches about 25 years of age. (Sandra Aamodt, Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years, National Public Radio) Comprehending the Holocaust is impossible for anyone, which makes it that much more unimaginable and unbelievable to a child. It is quite simple for one to lose sight of himself when faced with a scene of pure death. It is fair to say that most people will do anything in return to live a while longer with loved ones. Therefore, morals are thrown out the window and traded

In the memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel portrays the dehumanization of individuals and its lasting result in a loss of faith in God. Throughout the Holocaust, Jews were doggedly treated with disrespect and inhumanity. As more cruelty was bestowed upon them, the lower their flame of hope and faith became as they began turning on each other and focused on self preservation over family and friends. The flame within them never completely died, but rather stayed kindling throughout the journey until finally it stood flickering and idle at the eventual halt of this seemingly never-ending nightmare. Elie depicts the perpetuation of violence that crops up with the Jews by teaching of the loss in belief of a higher power from devout to doubt they

To begin, Elie along with millions of Holocaust victims are dehumanized. The Nazi’s used various ways to make people feel like they were animals. The Nazi’s would degrade the Jews to a point that they lost the desire to live. They did this by destroying the

There were many instances Jews were treated like brutes during the Holocaust. There were millions of times where humanity was nowhere to be found. There were also very many in Elie’s experiences

This was a direct contradiction to article 19 as the Nazi’s forced the Jews into a tranced state of internal affliction . In the same light, Elie yet again questioned his own mental and emotional foundation when he stated, “Blessed be God 's name? Why… would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled… Because in His great might, He had created… factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou… who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to end up in the furnaces?”(Wiesel 33). This excerpt illustrates how the Nazi’s use of death camps indirectly smothered Elie’s humanity and moral psyche. By eradicating so many people of his affiliation and restricting his religious practice, the Nazi’s destroyed all humanity left in Elie Wiesel.