Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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.

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.

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.

According to webster's dictionary, dehumanization is treating someone as though he or9 she is not a human being. In"Night"written by Elie Wiesel, the Germans treated the jews like animals, and over time they started acting like it. While many fall victim to the fate of becoming a brute, Elie retains his civility. No matter how viciously they treated Elie, he never loses his love for his father. For example, Elie had a choice to stay in the infirmary and become liberated, or go with his father on the march to Buchenwald and risk death.

“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.

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.

The cruelty on the part of the German army and scientists is legendary, but to Holocaust survivors it has been haunting. They did not even treat the Jews like people. For Wiesel, the things he witnesses and experiences at the hands of the Nazis and even desperate Jews, never leaves him. One incident in particular takes the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi soldiers to a new extreme: the hanging of the pipel, an imprisoned young boy with a beautiful face. The Germans hang a child, not even heavy enough to grant himself a quick death, without remorse. This, the apex of cruelty, again shows the lengths the Nazis are willing to go to simply to make a point and scare the others. This horror adds to the theme when Elie, forced to witness this hanging, recalls, “Behind me I heard the same man asking ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is He? Here He is. He is hanging here on the gallows.”

Within the story Night, Elie Wiesel puts the reader into his perspective and takes them on a journey through his Holocaust experience. He deeply describes his moments in and out of concentration camps, death marches and cattle car rides using first person pronouns throughout the story. The use of first person really composes the reader to personally consider themselves as Wiesel and draws their attention to the story in order to create a superior reading experience. When using first person, Elie describes how his personality, emotional and mental feelings change during the course of the story. He utterly expressed how the constant demand to abide by the Nazis steadily dehumanized every individual prisoner.

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the Nazis employ various acts of dehumanization towards the prisoners of Auschwitz and too many other lives in other camps around Nazi Europe. The Nazis take away the prisoner’s identities, starve them, and treat them like animals so much so that it causes them to begin to act like animals themselves. All of these atrocities align with Nazi Germany’s goal of killing the Jewish people and other groups as well. The repeated instances of dehumanization makes the prisoners much easier to control because all of these things combined take away their hope and without hope they have no chance of escape.

In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel writes about his experience inside the concentration camps of Germany during World War II. He realizes how his humanity changes after he is free. Elie ponders about if he can be re-humanized after he passes trials, when he looks at a mirror. Wiesel uses a gloomy tone to reveal how Elie succeeds in survival through dehumanization.

Imagine being forced to give up all you have to go work at a concentration camp. Elie Wiesel’s family had this happen to them during a very dark time in history. The Nazis initially started friendly, then became very cruel and harsh. The holocaust was an event in WWII where the Nazis gradually dehumanized the Jews by mistreating them and making them feel as less than human. The first way the Nazis gradually dehumanized the Jews was in the ghetto.

The haunting confrontations of the Holocaust documented by Elie Wiesel in his memoir Night bring to light the profound lasting effects on victims. As Elie walks through the different stages of the Holocaust, the different horrors he faces change him. These changes mould him to the core of who he is, even touching his faith. In his memoir, Elie reflects on a transformation shaped by his experiences and endurance of dehumanization and desentization that shaped his overall identity. The beginning of Elie’s journey is marked by his loss of faith under the dehumanising conditions of the camp.

Have you ever felt like lesser of a person than someone else? Maybe because of something they said? Or something they did? The psychology of the victimizer and victim was studied by Dr. Philip Zimbardo in his Stanford prison study experiment. His research provides insight into the evils inflicted by guards of the Holocaust and its impact on their prisoners.

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.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.