Two Examples Of Genocide In Night By Elie Wiesel

The novel Night by Elie Wiesel tells a devastating tale of a young man in concentration camp in World War II. Concentration camps were used in World War II to dehumanize and terrorize Jews. Dehumanization is the act of depriving humans of their rights and treating them as if they were worse than animals. Humans had been fighting for so long to get equality for everyone, but then Hitler rose to power and undid the work society had done. Many examples of how World War II used dehumanization were Hitler and his actions, leaving family members behind, and the labor camps in themselves.

The Holocaust, or a jewish sacrificial offering that is burned on an alter, largely refers to the massacre and slaughter of over 6 million european jews from 1933 to 1945. One of the largest genocides took place less than 100 years ago. A recently fresh event on the historical timeline, and yet there would be little known on exactly went on inside the camps without the testimonies of survivors. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, produced the book “Night” as a way to cope with his time in the labor camps and to shed light on the reality of the inhumanity that engulfed numerous concentration camps across europe. After ten years of silence, the book was written by Wiesel to express his personal experiences inside the labor camps, as well as his testimony to horrifying and inhumane actions inflicted upon his beloved family and bunk mates. In “Night”, Elie Wiesel explores the evils in humanity by sharing his personal experiences and personal witness of inhumanity, and shares his own moral values of man.

Twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time on Jewish mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. Even when the family and Elie were pushed to ghettos they remained calm and compliant. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can hardly move and have to survive on minimal food and water.

The Holocaust was a mass murder of millions of individuals’ primary to and during World War II. “Only 54 percent of the people surveyed by the Anti- Defamation League (ADL) in a massive, global poll has ever heard of the Holocaust” (Wiener-Bronner). The Holocaust was from 1933-1945 and was run by German leader named Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a man who wanted to create his own race of people. Therefore to create this race, he wiped out anyone who did not have the specific descriptions that he wanted. For people to fit into his race, they had to have blue eyes and blond hair. This excluded the Jews and from then on Hitler slowly dehumanized them. In the concentration camp the first thing they had to pass was the selection test. The selection test was what the SS man (German soldiers) used to determine who was fit for work. Usually children, mothers, and elders were the first to die because they were not mentally fit for the work they were going to be given. People who passed the selection process either died of starvation, disease, fatigue, or assassination. It took twelve years before anyone intervened and by then it was too late for millions of people. Even though over twelve million people died during the Holocaust, genocides have still happened in Rwanda, Darfur and Cambodia.

Inhumanity. The cruelest of people are responsible for this. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses imagery, tone, and characterization to show the effects of inhumane actions. Night is about a young boy and his father who get separated from the rest of their family during selection of the Holocaust. This story tells how Elie survived his times in the concentration camps, even with all of the inhumane actions of the Germans.

In Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, “Night” there are many examples of dehumanization from start to finish. Dehumanization is stripping a person of every quality that makes them human. This includes their identity, individuality, and soul. The Night shows the process by which the Nazis reduced the Jews to little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. The book takes place in World War 2, in the Holocaust. Eliezer and his family are very much directly affected by actions taken by the Nazis as well as all the other Jews. Throughout the whole book, the Nazis use practices such as beatings, starvation, theft of possessions, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, and many more actions represented through the text of this book that are all examples of dehumanization. Eliezer, the narrator of the story, arrived at the concentration camp of Auschwitz when he was fifteen years old. He arrived by the transportation of cattle cars. Within the various camps, Eliezer spent ten months of abuse and dehumanization. He lost so much due to the Germans.

Man loves to kill. In response to the question asked, man will continue to commit such atrocities as a genocide. Man will never learn from past mistakes or all of a sudden stop mass killings or genocides. Humans have always killed and they will continue to do it. Humans will not all of a sudden be pacifists and stop killing. This has happened with the Rwandan genocide and with the Holocaust in Night by Elie Wiesel. Man will not stop committing such atrocities and have a brighter future and these are only a few reasons why.

Steven Pinker implied that, “As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to the mass murder of people” (1). Steven Pinker revealed an interesting side to the controversial topic of mass murders and the causes of them. He revealed that as long as people in this world believe that they are better than other due to their race, religion, and everything else that defines a group of people as different from another group of people. People are and have been wrongfully treated differently due to the incompetence of some to realize that everyone is equal. They often believe that they were superior to others because of their physical attributes and beliefs that they had. The

Imagine if you were watching the news and there was an announcement about a mass genocide taking place right now,somewhere in the world.How would you feel?Well,sadly this is a reality to some people in the world. The word genocide itself is enough to strike fear into the hearts of many. The holocaust and the cultural revolution of Tibet were both large acts of genocide which were both handled differently by the victims and by the world as a whole.Genocide is a horrible crime that has been committed many times throughout history and many cases have been ignored by most of the world.

In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie retells the horrifying and torturous treatment that he and other Jews suffered from at the hands of the Nazis. The Jews were treated as if they were no less than inanimate objects and worse than animals all because of their religion. The Nazis made sure that the Jews knew that had no rights and that meant nothing to them. The Jews experienced such inhumane events that no one could ever relate to, they lost everything from their dignity, to their property, and even their humanity.

Wiesel uses a Rhetorical Question to demonstrate that dehumanization causes people to not care whether they live or die. For example Eliezer states that it would not matter when he died: “Here or else where- what difference did it make? To die today or tomorrow, or later? The night was long and never ending” (Wiesel 72). This quotation demonstrates that it did not matter when he died because he knew it was going to happen and Eliezer was careless. The use of the words die today or tomorrow, or later implies that No matter what day it is either way he will eventually die.

In the memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel explains his experience during the holocaust when Hitler wanted to kill all Jews and get rid of all disabled people. Wiesel struggles in the beginning of the book when Wiesel cares about keeping his father alive and staying together, despite the end of the book when he changed to then only caring about survival where if he had to choose who would stay alive him or his father he would choose himself and it wouldnt even hurt him. Due to all the dehumanization that Wiesel experience made him change the way he views the world because he only cares about himself he became selfish. The amount of dehumanization that victims experienced changed the way they view the world because as they get more dehumanization they worry less about their values.

“Men to the left! Women to the right!,”(page 29). When they stepped foot off the train at Birkenau, they were no longer considered “people”. The Nazis were ready to ruin and devastate the lives of many. In the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, the Nazis try to dehumanize the Jews by getting rid of them through Hitler’s three fold plan; ghettos, annihilation, and expulsion. The Nazis take away their identity, physically abuse them, and verbally abuse them to successfully dehumanize Eliezer, his father, and other Jews at the camp. Immediately after being evacuated from their homes in Sighet, dehumanization had begun, and it only continued to get worse throughout their journey during the Holocaust.

Witnessing an attempt of genocide can change a person, mentally and physically. In the book Night, you will see through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor. The Holocaust impacted Elie’s decisions and also his point of views. Elie goes through starvation, emotions and death. He witnesses murder in ways unimaginable. He see’s SS soldiers kill people for looking at them. He see’s Kappos killing their own race. Seeing murder can bring out emotions you never knew you had. These emotions can change a person. Going through these changes can affect a person's mental state.

Genocide is a powerful word. International law requires intervention if something is deemed genocide. There is no doubt that the Holocaust is the most famous and most studied case of genocide, although there have been numerous throughout history. One of the more recent is the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people were killed (United Human Rights). The two have several similarities and differences in their origins, exterminations and aftermath.