Human Brutality In Elie Wiesel's Night

Targeting people due to their identity. Murdering tens of thousands of innocent people. Disrespecting the deceased. These three scenarios all depict man’s inhumanity to man. The oppression of mass amounts of people is often portrayed in not only life, but also in literature and film. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel describes the inhumanity he endured while in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Additionally, in the film Hotel Rwanda, the producers portray the acts of atrocities toward Tutsi and Hutu refugees during the Rwandan genocide. Inhumanity is a universal cruelty toward human life which man often “turns a blind eye to” due to their apathy.

The Holocaust, or a jewish sacrificial offering that is burned on an alter, largely refers to the massacre and slaughter of over 6 million european jews from 1933 to 1945. One of the largest genocides took place less than 100 years ago. A recently fresh event on the historical timeline, and yet there would be little known on exactly went on inside the camps without the testimonies of survivors. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, produced the book “Night” as a way to cope with his time in the labor camps and to shed light on the reality of the inhumanity that engulfed numerous concentration camps across europe. After ten years of silence, the book was written by Wiesel to express his personal experiences inside the labor camps, as well as his testimony to horrifying and inhumane actions inflicted upon his beloved family and bunk mates. In “Night”, Elie Wiesel explores the evils in humanity by sharing his personal experiences and personal witness of inhumanity, and shares his own moral values of man.

Through human suffering, numbness, and Elie’s actions, Night shows that even though the main character Elie has been through these tragic experiences of the Holocaust, he tells his story accurately with strong verbal image descriptions. Weisel demonstrates the atrocities of the Holocaust through his descriptions of how he saw human suffering. In the book, Night, the author uses a lack of emotion with the character Elie to demonstrate the numb feelings of the Holocaust. Also in the book, Elie’s actions toward other characters reflect greatly throughout the whole story.

The human race has always struggled with the simple task of being humane. This started with the people killing over land, all the way to terrible events, such as the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel does a great job in his book, Night, talking about some of the things the Nazis did. The Nazis treated the Jewish people in the most inhumane way history has ever seen. The book approaches this just by throwing it directly in one’s face. Elie has a lot to say about humanity and inhumanity, as does Morrie Schwartz. Morrie is a Professor at Brandeis University and does a great job explaining why humanity should overcome inhumanity. Both Elie and Morrie agree that humanity and inhumanity were both very big things in their lifetime and humanity can be achieved through love, and concern for others.

When it comes to retaining one’s humanity in the face of suffering a person has the choice to preserve it or not. To elaborate, in the novel, Night, there where instances were the loss of humanity was evident. Such as, when Elie witness the prisoners “instincts of self-preservation, of self-dense, [and] of…[desert them]”(Wiesel 36). And others were the loss of humanity wasn’t evident. Specifically, when Elie gets help from a French woman who states,” Don’t cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day…the day will come but not now” (53). All in all, these instances were what made up the whole story. As they accumulated, the question of whether a person had the ability to retain their humanity or not became apparent and, rather, hard to

Inhumanity. The cruelest of people are responsible for this. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses imagery, tone, and characterization to show the effects of inhumane actions. Night is about a young boy and his father who get separated from the rest of their family during selection of the Holocaust. This story tells how Elie survived his times in the concentration camps, even with all of the inhumane actions of the Germans.

The Holocaust was part of most infamous events in our modern world history, World War II. Night by Elie Wiesel shows one of the horrific lives lived in a concentration camp. This book brings insights including ways and effects of dehumanization and also effects on the antagonist’s followers.

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 the novel Night, Elie Wiesel writes about his experience inside the concentration camps of Germany during World War Two. 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 the Nazis’ plan to dehumanize the Jews so that their suffering .

“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes gazed at me and never left.” (Wiesel 115). Since the inmates were treated horribly for such a tremendous amount of time, it left images of the beatings they took, the never ending-work they had to do, and the killing of their friends in their head. Two main points proven in Night by Elie Wiesel is how he created stronger bonds with people and how he lost faith in someone he use to praise and pray to every day.

The Holocaust claimed millions of lives, and the survivors witnessed an event incomprehensible to the remainder of humanity. Elie Wiesel, a burdened survivor of the Genocide, describes his own experiences in his autobiographical memoir Night. Throughout the years in the concentration camps, Wiesel and the other Jews witness countless events of Nazis intentionally dehumanizing the Jews. After hearing these brutal remarks for years, Wiesel begins to internalize these thoughts. His writing reflects his internalization as he often compares himself and the others to animals. Elie Wiesel animalizes the Jews while personifying darkness to further dehumanize the Jews and show how the Nazi’s mental warfare continues to affect him.

The quote “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn” is very relevant in the Holocaust texts Night by Elie Wiesel and The Last Days directed by James Moll because it really sums up the Holocaust. Both these texts give insight to what happened inside the camps and how the survivors were changed forever. These texts both show that in times of extreme inhumanity, one can lose his faith, which leads to a loss of innocence.

The memoir, Night, written by Elie Wiesel, talks about Elie, the main character, experiences life in several concentration camps and settings. The narrative starts off in Sighet, Elie’s hometown; however, Elie spends the most time at Auschwitz—a concentration camp in Poland overrun by the Nazis. Wiesel writes himself as the main character, a young Jewish boy about 14 years old. Elie not only struggles with abuse and starvation, he also struggles with his faith in God—questioning God’s justice—and himself as he goes through the concentration camps. Through Elie’s struggles, the author conveys that there was none or very little humanity left in the concentration camps. Human nature was very scarce with all the cruel treatment from the Nazis. Wiesel uses the symbols fire, bread, and eyes to convey and illustrate themes in the narrative.

In the book Night Elie Wiesel states that he saw “infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns”(Wiesel 6). Elie saw kids getting shot so he lost hope and that's inhumanity because you don't see babies getting shot. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel inhumanity made him lose hope and inhumanity can cause more inhumanity.

In the memoir Night, the narrator Elie Wiesel recounts a moment when they were transported to another concentration camp and forced to run, “the ss officers were running as well they had orders to shoot anyone who could not sustain the pace.’’ (wiesel 85). When they were running to another concentration camp a boy named zalman got a stomach cramp, felt and got trampled by everyone. As the author describes his experiences, many other examples of inhumanity and disbelief. One theme in Night is that inhumanity can cause loss of faith to begin with Elie wiesel sometimes had long discussions with his friend because he was really religious, he frequently asked him about his faith, “And why do you pray, Moishe?’’ I asked him. “I pray to the god within me for the strength to ask him the real question.