It’s hard to think that any Holocaust victim wasn’t treated like and turned into a brute when the average weight of an adult survivor was only 60 pounds. Elie Wiesel seems to agree. In his book Night he vividly describes the process of sucking every last bit of life out of a man until he is unable to work. To turn people starving, freezing, sick, hopeless, and exhausted is definitely a way to turn them into animal like beings. Even the strongest of peoples can collapse if pushed hard enough. Yet it is saddening to think about why they pushed them so hard
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
But he does not turn into a brute. He escapes this fate essentially because he is lucky. Why did he survive and others did not? There is, in fact no accurate explanation. He himself does not know the answer to this. “If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival” (vii Wiesel) He wonders why he is someone that is alive today and a plethora of the other Jews are not. There might not be an explanation, but it happened for a reason. He wants to give people somewhat of an experience of the Holocaust. He wants to do something that will make a difference because he did in fact survive.
Elie observes and experiences many instances of indifference throughout his memoir. In the first chapter, the people of Sighet oppose Moshe the Beadle’s stories of his escape from the Nazis. They say in response to Moshe, “He's just trying to make us pity him. What an imagination he has! Poor fellow. He's gone mad” (4-5). This lack of sympathy causes Moshe to lose faith in his town and in himself. On the ride to Auschwitz, a soldier dehumanizes the Jews. He explains, “If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot, like dogs” (22). The soldier shows no respect for the people,
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
Throughout the book it is used in many different forms. Violence is used to control others, and the Germans used this to force the Jews into concentration camps. Once they were there the Nazis used many types of physical abuse to put the Jews in pain, and also to force them to follow all of their commands. They were treated like animals. The rations of food were close to none, and many prisoners suffered from malnutrition. Aside from starvation and physical abuse, the Nazis burned fully conscious people. At the camps there were crematoriums. Where women, children and men were tossed to their death. Regardless of your intelligence, health or age everyone had a chance of being thrown into the crematorium. Elie performed as many tricks as he could to subject himself to the least amount of physical abuse possible. The first thing he did, was lie about his age. He declared to an officer he was 18 when he first arrived, when he was only 15. Elie knew if he told them he was 15, he would not be subject to work and there was a good chance he would be sent straight to the crematorium, with no hesitation. Elie escaped the physical harm more than most did. Elie survived in multiple different concentration camps for over a year. For the most part, he was
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.
The Jews were starved to death, shot down for the most pointless reasons, were put through all different kinds of torture. Those who survived were forced to work in labor camps, all because Adolf Hitler had a bone to pick with Jews. Adolf Hitler was a dictator who had 850,000 Nazis under his hand. He despised Jews, and used his forces to take Jews hostage and force them to work in concentration camps. Ironically enough, it is believed that Hitler may have had Jewish ancestry. He wanted to rid the world of Jews, creating what he believed to be a perfect civilization.
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
Before Elie went to Auschwitz, he exhibited many positive character traits. (Such as Compassion, Depressed, and Friendly. An example of compassion that Elie showed before was on page 5 that said, “And Moishe the Beadle, the poorest of the poor of Sighet, spoke to me for hours on end about the Kabbalah’s revelations and its mysteries. Thus began my initiation. Together we would read, over and over against, the same page of the Zohar. Not to learn it by heart but to discover within the very essence of divinity”(Wiesel). How he shows compassion is, Elie treats a man of lower social status with kindness, and the man repays him with studies of the Zohar. So a random act of kindness, could pay off someday, you never know. The next example of how Elie showed traits before Auschwitz was depression on page 10, “The Bible commands us to rejoice during the eight days of Passover, but our hearts were not in it. We wished the holiday would end so as not to have to pretend”(Wiesel 10). Elie was so depressed and scared, that
Within human nature there is a want to act against the corruption and evils of society. A human’s moral compass directs each person to fight against what is considered evil and to praise everything that is believed to be good. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (The Devil Came on Horseback). This means that in order for humans to rise above the evils of the world, good men have to take action against those who have committed a wrong. “Not a cry of distress, not a groan, nothing but a mass agony, in silence.”(pg.84). Due to Elie and the other Jews submission to the powerful Nazis, the dehumanization of the Jews remained
The Nazis placed Elie and all the others in to cattle cars to transport them from place to place. “We were incapable of thinking. Our senses numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything” The Nazis most definitely treated the Jews people as less than human. They were stripped of all their humanity, these Nazis shaving off heads and tattooing them “I became A-7713.
Elie is dehumanized throughout a variety of events that take place during the holocaust. Early on in the book the guards become aware of Elies gold tooth that he refuses to give up, and keeps pushing off. This leads the guards to the action of beating Elie’s father to maybe get a response they want from Elie. “that presented Franek with the opportunity to torment him and on, on a daily basis, to thrash him savagely” When Elie’s father is beaten Elie describes how he doesn’t even blink. Another way Elie is dehumanized is when the prisoners are running through the snow Elie suggest the idea of wanting to die, but can’t seem to go through with it because he has to take care of his father. Elie begins to lose his faith in God after witnessing young
When Elie’s father passes away from illness, Elie has been devastated and mentions how “nothing mattered to me anymore.” (pg.113) The destruction of deep and sentimental relationships where one depends on another for moral and physical support can ruin a person, both mentally and physically making it extremely difficult to survive. Being social animals, humans thrive with others but crumble when isolated. After being in this horrific environment of the concentration camps, where millions are tortured and killed just for being a certain race, Elie stated that with his father they, “Never before had we understood each other so clearly.”
People in the Holocaust suffered things that a human should never go through. People suffered starvation, cold weather, no clothes, and getting beat with whips everyday. Babies, children, kids, adults, and teenagers burned and killed everyday. Not to mention, they worked in the cold winters. Jews in the 1940’s were treated like animals and were lucky if they got a meal a day. Families were separated from each other and never saw each other again. The Holocaust will never be forgotten. A human should never go through what the Jews suffered. People were forced to help kill and burn friends, family, and people they didn’t even know. The concentration camps were impossible to escape. The barbed wire fences stood 8 feet high. The only way you could
Some of the examples are that the Germans make the Jewish people live in conditions that no human being should ever live in. They also get treated as if they are animals, and the fact that humans are doing this to other humans is what makes it inhumane. “Anyone who still owns gold, silver, or watches must hand them over now. Anyone who will be found to have kept any of these will be shot on the spot.” (Wiesel 24). The Germans also take things from the Jews to show that they are in control and if they do not obey what the soldiers say they will be shot. The killing of the Jews by the Germans is the main form of humanity in the book. Multiple Jews were hung one by one as Elie had to watch (Wiesel 63). Humanity does occur in Night despite all of the awful things that happen. Elie is one example of humanity. Elie helps his father get through times that his father does not think that he will. Elie tries to keep his father up and take care of him while the Germans are trying to downgrade
While the Holocaust was going on someone wrote a quote on a cellar wall, and that quote read, “I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I cannot feel it. I believe in God even when he is silent.” Whoever wrote that quote had so much faith in God that even though nothing was being done about what was happening to them at the time, that he still believed God was doing everything in His power to help them. Elie Wiesel was put through so much through the few years he was in the concentration camps, yet he still managed to pull through and write a book about his experiences. Dehumanization occurred many times throughout Elie’s books, he went through not eating or drinking anything but snow for seven days,