Loss Of Individuality In Night Elie Wiesel

Night, by Elie Wiesel, shares the terrifying power of a first-hand account of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was taken from his home in 1944, to Auschwitz, and then Buchenwald. Immediately, he was exposed to the brutalities he would face for a full year. One of them being, dehumanization. Nazi’s made conscious efforts to dehumanize the Jews. Although it started as the Jews not being able to own their personal belongings, through the progression of the Holocaust the Jews found themselves being stripped of their dignity. The Jews eventually were not even call by name, but were referred to by a number, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattoo numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (Wiesel, 42)

In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel gives an account about his life in a concentration camp. His focus is of course on his obstacles and challenges while in the camp, but his behavior is an example of how human beings respond to life in a concentration camp. The mood, personality, behavior, and obviously physical changes that occur are well documented in this novel. He also shows, as time wears on, how these changes become more profound and all the more appalling. As the reader follows Elie Wiesel’s story, from his home in the ghetto, to his internment at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to his transfer and eventual release at Buchenwald, one can see the impact of these changes first hand.

During the Holocaust, approximately six million non-Aryans, especially Jews, perished under the rule of the Nazis. Prisoners were frequently beaten, starved, and treated as if they were animals. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he recollects the traumatizing experiences he and his fellow prisoners

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.

His personality is changing. Elie also deals with constant beatings and witnesses terrible actions taken on other human beings that no one should see. This would harden anyone and turn them into a brute. Elie also shows his changed personality in the final chapters of the novel. Elie is looking for his father in the final camp and says “only if I didn’t find him, what a relief it would be”. Even though later Elie feels ashamed for his evil thoughts, he again shoes a brute characteristic. He is portraying that it would be much easier to survive in the camp without his father being a nuisance and burden to him. The events that Elie witnessed shaped him into a brute. Dehumanization is also a constant theme in Night, a prime example of this is when they arrive at the camps, “Men to the left, women to the right”. In this quote they treat them as if they were a heard of animals being lead to a slaughter house, these were women and children and loved ones being split up permanently. Another example in the book is when the Jews in the camps came across the crematoriums. “A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children.

In the history of the Holocaust, impactful events have signified a cause for the dehumanization of many Jews. Elie Wiesel in Night relates to a crisis of poisoning in the events that he experiences throughout the story. From examining Elie witnessing the horrors of concentration camps and the deaths of many people through harsh conditions, it is clear that Elie’s attitude, outlook, and identity changed throughout his time in the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel in Night experiences times of dehumanization throughout his time in the concentration camps. During the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and other prisoners were poisoned of their dignity in an event.

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night screaming because whenever you close your eyes images of the horrifying past haunt your dreams. Elie Wiesel writes in his book Night about his memories of when he was taken along with his family by Nazi’s in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to Buchenwald. The book is full of ups and downs as Elie and his dad experience conflict after conflict throughout their time in concentration camps. Throughout the text one can easily see that Elie showed how inhumanity can injure the human mind through imagery, tone and through paradoxes. One way Elie shows inhumanity can injure the human mind is through imagery.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night displays how the traumatic effects of the Holocaust shaped his identity, as it caused him to lose hope in humanity and goodness in the world due to loss of faith. An individual is greatly impacted by their identity as it can shape how others view them, their moral beliefs and how they reflect upon themselves. Those perceptions of Elie are altered by the intense punishments and orders the Nazi officers have on the captured Jewish. Wiesel is stripped of his rights and punished for his Jewish faith, which triggers the changes in his identity and turns into a lifeless prisoner. After seeing many of his fellow prisoners be killed or beaten, Elie undergoes a crisis of faith and God because seeing those events often causes mental stress.

Often times people say nothing has caused more suffering for man than man himself. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, tells his story about being in concentration camps for almost a year of his life to show the theme of how cruel and inhumane men can be to other men. The incidents that take place in Night are horrific. From the Nazis being cruel to the Jews to bystanders being cruel and ridiculing people for entertainment, this time period is filled with atrocities.

The appeal to emotion is the strongest by far. It seems almost impossible for a reader not to cry at the words of Wiesel. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. His vivid description of a child being hanged, how he was still alive, “struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes”, truly captures the ghastly occurrences of the death camp. His own discussion of how he had lost faith in a God, and how other sons were leaving or even beating their fathers with no care enlightens the reader to the true despair that surrounded the people that inhabited these camps. Also, his description of himself in a mirror as “a corpse” that “gazed back at me” installs in the reader the overwhelming sense of how this event so completely ravaged the human soul.

The horrific acts committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust stripped the Jewish population of their humanity. "Night" by Elie Wiesel is a memoir describes these appalling events. The novel documents the dehumanization of Wiesel, his father, and fellow Jews. When dehumanized individualized are debased and deprived of their basic human needs and worth. Dehumanized individuals may deal with this by reverting to animalistic behaviors as a means to survive. This was illustrated when young Wiesel had to sleep in a pile of dead and living bodies to keep warm and survive. Throughout the novel, Wiesel and fellow Jews were deprived of things that today everyone takes for granted such as food, water, clothing, and even their names. Individuals subjected to this sort of deprivation

Suffering. Pain. Misery. Death. All the negative thoughts in human minds, many that we never want to face. Pain can take a toll on you, physically and mentally. Yet, imagine someone facing those hardships in reality, what if it was reality that we never wanted to face; so we pushed it to its limits? Elie Wiesel was one of the many to face this tragic reality in Auschwitz, in the Concentration Camps, during the Holocaust...The pain of the Holocaust, the suffering of being ripped apart from your loved ones, to the mental and physical scars left by not only the S.S officers; but the horrors seen from the eyes of the purest souls. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie opens up the locked chest in his heart to tell us the horrifying experience that brought many to tears, otherwise known as The Concentration Camps and how it completely transformed Elie into a new person.

In this scene from Night, Elie Weisel writes about the ways the Germans treat the prisoners when they arrive at Auschwitz. In this scene, Weisel teaches his reader how the Germans brutalize their prisoners. Weisel describes the Germans as “beating” the prisoners repeatedly and forcing them into “disinfection,” this is similar to how one wouuld treat an object or animal, not a human being. This reflects the brutalizing of the prisoners. Elie writes about how as the prisoners were running they “threw” clothes at them and in that moment they had “ceased to be men”. Weisel also writes about how Meir Katz, “wore a child’s pants” and how Stern, was “floundering in a huge jacket.” The Nazis did not give the prisoners the proper clothes and threw the

Traumatic and scarring events occur on a daily basis; from house fires to war, these memories are almost impossible to forget. The Holocaust is only one of the millions of traumas that have occurred, yet it is known worldwide for sourcing millions of deaths. Elie Wiesel was among the many victims of the Holocaust, and one of the few survivors. In the memoir, “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, Elie, the main character, is forever changed because of his traumatic experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camps.

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.