Dehumanization in Night, by Elie Wiesel Essay

Millions and millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The dehumanization of the Jewish people by the Nazis in the form of making them look a certain way, taking away their identity, and starving them affected Eliezer’s outlook on life. During the Holocaust, the Germans made all the Jews look a certain way and all look the same. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, it states, “Every Jew had to wear the yellow star (pg. 11).” All the Jews were required to wear a yellow star on their clothing to indicate that they were now considered objects.

When the Blockalteste told him that he couldn’t help his father anymore, Elie thought, “He was right” (111). In the end, Elie’s father died and therefore cutting their relationships even more. Another example is when Mier killed his father over a piece of bread. The need for survival in the Holocaust made people even kill their family. Meir and his father’s relationship was torn up because of the Holocaust. Elie noticed that “Sons abandoned the remains of their fathers without a tear” (92). This shows the inhumane behavior the Holocaust evoked between sons and fathers. Towards the end of the book, people were ready to kill anyone to survive, even their family. Last but not least, when they all were running in the snow so that the Russians would not find the prisoners, Rabbi Eliahu’s son abandoned his father. Rabbi Eliahu and his son’s relationship was broken right when his son felt the need to abandon him. Elie had saw him intentionally run faster than his father and described the son’s actions as “letting the distance between them become greater” (91). This can have a literal and a figurative meaning behind it. The son running faster than his

Elie Wiesel’s book Night, tells what he went through and what was going on in the concentration camps. He was one of the few that made it out of the camps, and he suffered through all of the bad doings of Hitler and his men. This book gives many examples that show how Elie and the other Jews were dehumanized by being treated as something less than a human.

In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he utilizes a simile to develop the theme that everyone should be treated equally no matter their culture and religion and they should not be belittled over what they believe in. Wiesel uses the motif of dogs compared to humans in a careless tone in chapter 2. This focusses on dehumanization because the germans always would make the jews feel as if they were nothing and they would brutally break the jews down piece by piece. Later it mentions “Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine gun” (Wiesel 6). This supports my claim because when it says this it is showing that they used the babies as material.

“You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned” - Eliezer. These are various ways that the victims of the Holocaust were dehumanized. The book Night by Elie Wiesel follows a young boy by the name of Eliezer, who has faced many hardships during the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust, Eliezer was a healthy young Jewish boy and he is now a skinny and scrawny corpse. Throughout the course of the story, Eliezer and many other Jews in the Holocaust were dehumanized by getting treated as animals, beaten, and starved.

“He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.” Elie and his family just wanted to live a normal life. They didn’t have very much money, but were happy with the state they were in. One day, SS officers showed up and took Elie and his family away. Not knowing where they were going, they were obviously scared. Once they finally got there, they realized what they were in for, and that Moishe the Beadle was right. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, the German Army dehumanizes Elie Wiesel and the rest of the Jewish prisoners by depriving them of love, safety, and physiological needs.

Ryan Rogerson Mrs. Lori Connet English II Honors 15 March, 2024 So We Were Human? Night is an autobiographical account of the Holocaust from the perspective of Elie Wiesel. Night unapologetically discusses many of the horrors of the Holocaust, one of which being the rampant dehumanization of the Jewish people. Dehumanization is the deprivation of someone or something’s human qualities, personality, or dignity.

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.

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.

At this point, the Jews are very comfortable and go so far as to recognize

The Holocaust was a horrific time period when over six million Jewish people were systematically exterminated by the Nazi government. Throughout this period, the Jews were treated particularly inhumane because the Nazi viewed their ethnicities as a disease to humanity. Dehumanization is a featured theme in Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Holocaust since he demonstrated numerous examples of the severe conditions endured by the Jewish people. The nonfiction story Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on inhumanity and reveals human beings are capable of committing great atrocities and behaving cruelly, when such actions are condoned by society, peer pressure, and ethical beliefs. Elie Wiesel uses literary devices to produce a consistent theme of inhumanity.

Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night”, in 2006, which extrapolated on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense of helplessness that he feels when all his beliefs and rights as a human are reduced to silence. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. However, what remains uninterrupted is the sheer torture and dehumanization of Elie’s nation, the Jews. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes repeatedly as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity.

In Night Elie shares the horrific experiences as he is taken from his home and goes to Auschwitz where he is brutalized by Nazis. Elie lost his youth and began to doubt his faith (“Entering the Night”). Elie was given an insufficient amount of food and water, forced to work for long amounts of time, and punished for crimes he did not commit (“Night”). All of Elie’s suffering in the concentration camps during the Holocaust was because of a man named Adolf Hitler. Hitler used his powerful position to try and get rid of the Jewish population. When people became unemployed and Hitler wanted to be reelected, he used the Jews as scapegoats and blamed problems on them. Then, he put people

The concentration camps from World War II are part of a painful and tragic incident that we have learned about in school for many years. And while we are taught the facts, we may not fully understand the emotional impact it had upon the humans involved. Upon reading Night by Elie Wiesel, readers are given vivid descriptions of the gruesome and tragic behaviors that the Jews were forced to endure inside he treacherous concentration camps. Among all of the cruelties that the Jews were exposed to, a very significant form of the callous behaviors was the demoralization of the prisoners. Each inmate was given a tattoo of a number, and that tattoo became their new identity within the camp. Every prisoner was presented with tattered uniforms that became

Imagine, losing the part of you that makes you unique, or being treated like you were worth absolutely nothing. Think about losing all that you hold on to: your family, friends, everything that you had. Imagine, being treated like an animal, or barely receiving enough food to live. All of these situations and more is what the Jews went through during the Holocaust. During the period of 1944 - 1945, a man by the name of Elie Wiesel was one of the millions of Jews that were experiencing the wrath of Hitler’s destruction in the form of intense labor and starvation. The novel Night written by the same man, Elie Wiesel, highlights the constant struggle they faced every single day during the war. From the first acts of throwing the Jews into