Examples Of Dehumanization 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.

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

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

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.

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.

“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.

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

Elie Wiesel was a young boy strongly devoted to his faith, but it quickly dwindled as he experienced dehumanization. Throughout the novel Night, The Nazis conducted many acts of dehumanization upon the Jewish citizens. The Nazis harshly targeted the Jews’ humanity, and gradually softened their perception of being human. The inhumane treatment began in their very own town of Sighet and continued into various concentration camps they were forced into. Jews were brutalized in these camps and experienced many forms of mental and physical abuse. They were given tattoos in the camps, which was quite demeaning. They physically mistreated them, starved them and separated them from their loved ones.

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.

(109) The Jews by lose their faith in their god when the Germans hung a little boy, and he was dangling there struggling to die, and a Jew next to Elie said “where is god when this boy is suffering?” Elie said back to the man “God is here, he is hanging from the ropes” ( 90) As a result Elie loses faith in hs god. Inhumanity and cruelty were shown when the Jews were stripped of their identity, hair, jewelry, and shoes. The Germans stripped the Jews of everything because they did not want to have individuality among the Jews in the camps. The Germans gave the Jews numbers that were tattooed on the arms so they could be kept up with. It is almost like in prison how they have numbers so they do not get mixed up or lost track of. Once they had numbers the Jews were told to go to the barracks and they were given striped blue and white uniforms. This was also savage because it was the middle of winter. The Jews wore very little clothing causing some Jews to die from the cold and

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.

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.

Dehumanization is understood as the process of humans being deprived of what makes them human, but the Nazis took it a step further to encourage mistreatment between the prisoners . The Holocaust is a ghastly event in the history of the world, that killed around 6 million Jewish people, but the horrors don’t stop there. The way the prisoners were treated in the concentration camps left lasting effects on the survivors. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he recounts the horrific actions of the Nazi party against the Jewish people . The lasting effects of dehumanization do not take long to show, and the effects are only worsened through the numerous reminders from the Nazis that they aren’t worth anything.

Dehumanization means to deprive one of their human qualities. Dehumanization is a very harrowing act that the Nazi soldiers used to create fear in the Jews. After creating this fear in the Jews, the Nazis would force them to obey their orders. The fear that comes from dehumanization makes one more likely to obey, because how can someone take a stand and say that they are not going to listen when they have been brought down to a point where they feel as if they are nothing. By using Dehumanization, the Nazis were reducing the Jews to no less than objects, positions which meant nothing to them, belongings that were just a nuisance. In Night, it is quoted that “I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less…” (pg. 52). The minorities of society fell victim to dehumanization at the cruel hands of SS guards and the inhumane camp where they were held captive for what seemed to be endless periods of time.

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