Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

Although Eliezer survived the bloodcurdling Holocaust, countless others succumbed to the Nazi’s inhumanity. The Nazi’s progressively reduced the Jewish people to being little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place, as the Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Germans dehumanized Eliezer, his father, and other fellow Jews for the duration of the memoir Night, which had a lasting effect on Eliezer’s identity, attitude and outlook. Wiesel displays the Nazi’s vicious actions to accentuate the way by which they dehumanize the Jewish population. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, among other horrific actions.

Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to little more than "things" which were a nuisance to them. Discuss at least three specific examples of events that occurred which dehumanized Eliezer, his father, or his fellow Jews.

To dehumanize someone is when you deprive a person from human qualities, personality, or spirt. That’s what the Nazi’s did to multiple types of people in Europe during 1933 through 1945. They specifically did this to people of Jewish religion because they didn’t agree with their beliefs. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, his father, fellow Jews, and himself were slowly being dehumanized by the Nazi’s when a son was fighting his father for food because of starvation, tattooing of numbers on the prisoners, and packing them into wagons to transport them from place to place like animals.

From leaving jews naked in front of hundreds of people, to leaving them without food, and even taking away their names, the German Nazis dehumanized the whole of the jewish population which helped Hitler reach his ends. As Elie Wiesel writes in his award winning novel

The final way that Wiesel examines the psychological aspect of dehumanization occurs when the Nazis shave off the Jews’ hair. Wiesel and his fellow prisoners endured the humiliation of having their heads shaved upon arrival at the concentration camp. Wiesel writes, "Our hair disappears. " We are without beards, without hair... We look dead" (Wiesel 32).

In the air, the smell of burning flesh. It must have been around midnight. We had arrived” (pg28) Wiesel and the other Jews were constantly breathing in the smell of their dead family and friends. They couldn’t get sleep and they restless, But who could sleep when every Night you were awaken by the screams of the people you were captured with, Forced to leave there homes and complete things that were dehumanizing of their pride. “We could begin to doze again, to rest, to dream …and so an hour or two passed. Another scream jotted us” (Pg. 26) from those moments that began the race towards death, instead of who would go first they were wishing they would go last. Some feared for their life while others have given

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, imagery is employed to show the dehumanization of the Jewish people by the Nazis as the Jews develop the “survival of the fittest” mentality, and as Eliezer looses the ability to express emotions. Wiesel uses imagery of the Jews’ “survival of the fittest” mentality to show the dehumanization of the Jews who are forced to endure treacherous conditions in the concentration camps. The enslaved Jews experience the worst forms of inhumane treatment. Pushed beyond their ability to deal with the oppressing starvation, cold, disease, exhaustion, and cruelty, the Jews lose their sanity and morality. Thus, Wiesel refers to the Jews as, “wild beasts of prey with animal hatred

“In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (PG.36). Elie is a jewish boy from Transylvania and is taken to Auschwitz where he is separated from his mother and sister. His father and Elie are moved the the concentration camp called “Buna” and spend most of their time there. They then had to be evacuated to Gleiwitz, where they ran about 42 miles to get there. They spent about 3 days there and then they were transported to Buchenwald by train. There they are rescued by Americans and a resistance part that attacked the camp. Sadly Elie’s father dies in Buchenwald due to a sickness and being sent to the crematory. Dehumanization of the Jewish people in “Night” ,by Elie Wiesel, happened in a variety of ways and helped Hitler achieve his ideas about Jewish people.

Dehumanization is the denial of human rights. Night by Elie Wiesel depicts the events that dehumanized the Jews during the holocaust. Hitler dehumanized the Jews by stripping them of their identities, treating them like animals and making them turn on one another.

The Jews were dehumanized by first being stripped of their rights as a human and their identities. A quote from Maus I states that, “They registered us in … They took from us our names.” (pg. 6) The Jews were forced to be stripped of their clothes as a form of public humiliation. By doing this, they made everyone feel as if they were worthless and that they were not special in any type of way. The Nazis mowed people down in a “Holocaust of Bullets” and also subjected Jews to horrendous public humiliation by forcing them to strip in the streets. In the concentration camps the Jews also had to go through the process of getting all their hair cut off.

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.

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

The Nazies were known for their ability to dehumanize their prisoners. “They took our hair off with clippers, and shaved off all the hair on our

Dehumanization is the act of taking one’s human qualities away from them, this can be done using voice and also using actions. During the time of the Holocaust, the Nazi’s used their power to abuse and dehumanize the Jewish people. They would beat and kill them, they would yell at them and they stripped the Jews of their dignity and rights. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, one recurring theme is the dehumanization of the Jews. Throughout Night by Elie Wiesel, one can see the theme of dehumanization through the way the Nazi’s treated the Jews, spoke to the Jews, and how the Jews treated one another.

During the Holocaust, German Nazis slaughtered Jewish people and held them prisoner as well. While they were held captive, the Jewish people were often dehumanized. Dehumanization is defined as the process of depriving a person or group of human qualities. Throughout the book Night by Elie Wiesel, there is many examples of dehumanization, like taking away personal identities, starvation, and being forced to watch others be murdered that helped Adolf Hitler achieve his ends.