What Is The Theme Of Night By Elie Wiesel Dehumanization

Elie Wiesel is a Jewish teenager. He leads a very religious life until he, and thousands of other Jews are placed into concentration camps. Throughout his book, Night, we learn about the struggles in the concentration camp. They are forced to do hard labor, sleep in freezing temperatures, and eat very little while being subject to watching hundreds die every day for no reason other than their faith. They were being dehumanized.

Elie purposes in writing “Night” is so people who were not around during the time or even were, know just exactly what the Jews went through. They were killed for being to old or young. The Jews were killed for being female. they were given small ration of food , soup and bread. The Jews were beaten to death. Some were forced to kill there own friends and family with the crematories. Elie also wrote this to show people that actually happen , that it was not made up. The Jews were dehumanized by beating treated like slaves and animals while in the camps. Universal Declaration of Human rights (1948), all humans beings are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedom. The United Nations has stated in clear and simple terms

Night, by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir that recounts his horrific experience of life during the Holocaust. Wiesel is only fifteen when German soldiers invade his home town of Sighet, Transylvania. Before long, the Jews of Sighet are forced into cramped ghettos until they are all sent to concentration camps. For over a year, Wiesel suffers various forms of inhumane treatment as he moves between different concentration camps, eventually ending up in Buchenwald where he is freed along with the rest of the prisoners by the Americans in 1945. Throughout Wiesel’s telling of this story, similes and metaphors really emphasize the dehumanization that Jews and Wiesel himself faced at the hands of their German captors by creating a correlation between the Jewish prisoners and animals.

How are Jews supposed to live normally when every human being around them, including other Jews, are fighting against them? Due to dehumanization, the survivors of the Holocaust are as lifeless as the victims psychologically. It is nearly impossible that after experiencing a traumatic event such as Holocaust to feel normal again, to feel like a human again. Throughout history and in the book Night by Elie Wiesel, it is evident that gentiles did not care about the Jewish nation. Moreover, not even the Jewish people stick together and cared for one another. Thus the Jews ceased to feel like human beings during and after the Holocaust.

Greater than any war, plague, or catastrophe and it’s potential damage to human life is beyond calculation, the feeling of dehumanization is a feeling beyond description. Elie Wiesel a Jew Holocaust survivor from Sighet, Transylvania writes a memoir Night. In his memoir he writes about his own experiences in 1944 during the holocaust. Throughout this story Elie goes through lots of challenges that ultimately challenge his faith as a human. In resemblance, Jakob Blankitny a Jew from Maków Mazowiecki, Poland writes his take on his experiences in 1944 throughout the holocaust and how he and his family are treated by the Nazis and degraded as humans. In dire circumstances, these texts argue that dissolving one into a primitive with savage, animal characteristics are necessary for survival under inhumane conditions.

Dehumanization worked for the Nazis in WW2. Dehumanization is the process of making feel helpless and unworthy. The Nazis ideology was to dehumanize all the Jews. The effects of dehumanization are to weaken the person that is being dehumanized by mental and physical mistreatment. The ways the Nazis physically mistreated the Jews were hitting, beating, and death runs. The ways the Nazis mentally mistreated the Jews were yelling and screaming at them. The Nazis also put Jews into cattle cars. Which to me shows how the Nazis see the Jews as lower level species and how that is one way of dehumanization. Another thing the Nazis did to dehumanize the Jews was to split up their families. The reason behind this was so they could feel hopeless and not have anyone to help them in need.

At this point, the Jews are very comfortable and go so far as to recognize

Dehumanization is trying to make others feel less human. Extermination is systematic murders, or mass killings. When a foreign Jew from Sighet came back from expulsion he told all the Jewish people of Sighet that “infants were being tossed up in the air and used as targets for machine guns” (Wiesel 6). This shows that germans did not treat the Jewish population as real live, breathing humans. The SS officers would yell “...move, you lazy good-for-nothings” and “...you will be shot, like dogs” (Wiesel 19, 24).

One thing that the Nazis did was once the Jewish people arrived at the camps they were given tattooed numbers and those numbers were there new names. Instead of being called by their names they were now identified by their numbers. “ In the afternoon we were made to line up.Three prisoners brought a table and some medical instruments.With the left sleeve rolled up, each person passed in front of a table. The three ‘veterans’ with needles in their hand engraved a number on our left arms.I became A-7713. After that I had no other name” (39).The Jews were no longer by there names but by their names to show that they are weak and have no right to have a name. The Jews having number to replace their names was one of the ways the Jews were dehumanized.

Another good example of dehumanization in the night is when the Jews are moved to another concentration camp. The following quote shows how the Jews act on the train, “Meir. Meir, my boy! Don’t you recognize me? I’m your father…you’re hurting me…you’re

A large part of the story Night outlines the intense dehumanization of the Jewish people. This is important to the story because it adds to the cruelty of the whole event by highlighting that there were many small sometimes subtle actions that added up to horrific results. Through small acts committed by the Nazi’s, the Jewish people themselves, and other people they encounter, the Jewish people begin to act increasingly animalistic and savage towards each other and the world. A prime example of this is the way the Jewish people are transported to Birkenau. They are transported in cattle cars, like they themselves are animals. It is ultimately the fear and the terrible transport conditions that lead to a group of Jewish men “beating” (26) a woman on the head several times because she would not stop screaming in fear. This is the first savage behaviour demonstrated by this group of people, and it only presents itself after they are treated as savages. The

Another way the Germans dehumanized the Jews was by taking away all of their belongings. Some of these items they could live without, but they definitely did not realize how much they took them for granted. Lastly, the Jews were given numbers instead of their names. As the novel claimed, “The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). This act of taking away the Jews names and replacing them with numbers is an inhumane act which is dehumanizing towards them. People do not realize that something as simple as a name can have so much meaning until it is taken away. Therefore, the Germans stripped the Jews of everything that resembled a past life, which was dehumanizing.

(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

The SS officers would put everyone through selection and only the grown and strong would survive. Truckloads of children “Babies! Yes...children thrown into the pit of flames”(Wiesel 32) and grown men hung for all to see, their bodies waving in the wind like a flag. For those who did survive selection, they lost their names and were tattooed with their new titles “‘A-7713?’ ‘That’s me.’”(Wiesel 51) The Jews were consistently treated like animals by the Nazi’s and if that was not enough, they were also told how worthless they were.

The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own