Dehumanization In 2006, Elie Wiesel published the memoir “Night,” which focuses on his terrifying experiences in the Nazi extermination camps during the World War ll. Elie, a sixteen-year-old Jewish boy, is projected as a dynamic character who experiences overpowering conflicts in his emotions. One of his greatest struggles is the sense helplessness that he feels when all the beliefs and rights, of an entire nation, are reduced to silence. Elie and the Jews are subjected daily to uninterrupted torture and dehumanization. During the time spent in the concentration camp, Elie is engulfed by an uninterrupted roar of pain and despair. Throughout this horrific experience, Elie’s soul perishes as he faces constant psychological abuse, inhuman living conditions, and brutal negation of his humanity. At the beginning of the memoir, Elie describes the extent of psychological abuse that he is subjected to, and already the reader can sense a theme of darkness. The atrocious cruelty showed by Nazi soldiers toward Jews, is beyond all realms of rationality. Through strategic verbal abuse, Nazi soldiers slowly deprive the Jews of their stimulus and ability to react. The author reveals, “Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog…The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us” (Wiesel 36). This daily psychological pressure is intended to extinguish any trace of humanity in Jews. The Nazi soldiers know that if they deprive the Jews of their innate nature and interests in life, it would be easier to instill fear and exponentially erase hope. The author affirms, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would had dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast?” (39). In this section of the memoir, Elie underscores the Nazis’ success in creating a mental paralysis and an incapacity to react to injustice. The Nazis are using one of the most invasive forms of torture, the psychological abuse. They are progressing every day in their brutal plan, and consequently, the Jews’ anguish becomes more intense and precise. Caleb Lewis in
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....” –Elie Wiesel expressed shortly after his harsh experience with the Holocaust. As many read through Elie’s book Night, they recognize what Elie fought through while he was staying in the Concentration Camps. People have realized the brutal conditions that the he had gone through and have came to the thought of how it effected his future and what he has done ever since the horrible Holocaust.
Concentration camps are similar to the things people see their nightmares. The creation of a twisted government that spread hatred and suffering throughout the world. Night is an in depth account of the atrocities committed in these horrible places. The story of dehumanization of an entire group of people through the eyes of a young boy,Elie Wiesel. In Night Wiesel portrays the dehumanization of the jewish people as unnatural and undeserved. The difficulties Wiesel went through are all collected in one small book
Dehumanization the process of stripping people of their human qualities. In the novel night by Elie Wiesel the author uses many dehumanization scenarios to show what the jews experienced during the holocaust. They were stripped of their clothing and number like cattle for that fear was more important than food. The ss went though all of this for the exterminating the jews race.
At this point, the Jews are very comfortable and go so far as to recognize
Elie Wiesel’s book “Night” shows the life of a father and son going through the concentration camp of World War II. Their life long journey begins from when they are taken from their home in Sighet, they experience harsh and inhuman conditions in the camps. These conditions cause Elie and his father’s relationship to change. During their time there, Elie and his father experience a reversal in roles.
Imagine being cruelly tortured, starved, and worked to death everyday. In his autobiographical novel, Night, Eliezer Wiesel shares his experiences of being a Jew during the rule of Adolf Hitler, an anti-semite. When Hitler proposed the Final Solution, the eradication of all Jews, Eliezer and his family were forcefully taken to a concentration camp called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Although Eliezer survived, he lost his family and identity due to traumatizing horrors of camp. Over the course of the novel, Eliezer’s actions and words have demonstrated that he changed from being religious and caring to faithless and selfish.
Elie Wiesel once said that “No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.” The Nazi Party; however, impose themselves over people of Jewish race and faith through their use of dehumanization. Through the holocaust death camps, the SS belittle the Jewish people, and set them to the level of livestock animals. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, Wiesel depicts of the unrivaled extent of dehumanization the holocaust prisoners are oppressed by, primarily displayed through the animalistic treatment of the prisoners throughout their time in the camp, the lack of humane nutrition provided to the prisoners, and the removal of the prisoners very identity by replacing their names with
Due to the Nazis’ terrible acts, the Jews who were persecuted began to forget themselves and what makes them civil and human. It destroyed their bonds with friends and family and caused them to act savage. Elie himself described his own peers using words such as “...beaten dogs…” (17), “...snake like...” (59), “Beasts of prey…” (101), and more. These descriptions are not an accident. Elie’s purpose for writing this way is to remind his readers that, as unbelievable as most people may find the actions carried out by the Jews in this book are, they must remember that these were average people living their day to day lives until they were taken away by the Nazis.
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.
In the literary memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel, he informs the readers about his journey of sufferings in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust, he used his painful and awful hardships from the Holocaust and exposes that this is what takes place in World Wars. He used the point of view of Eliezer as narrator to relay the autobiographical events from his perspective and always speak in the first person. As Eliezer’s viewpoint is limited to his own experience, and so the tone of Night is intimate, subjective and hugely personal. Elie’s main objective is to describe to the readers the hideous and horrifying scenes and feelings he experienced through as a
The innocent Jewish children and babies are “thrown into flames.” They were also “tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns. (6)” The memoir Night retells the experience of a 15-year old Jewish boy, Elie, who spends many months in WWII concentration camps with his father Shlomo. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and many others are dehumanized both mentally and physically.
Not many are able to watch others get tortured and killed both mentally and physically everyday. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, explores the events which dehumanized Eliezer and the other Jews. The dehumanization of Jews help with the “final solution”. In the memoir, Eliezer goes through a brutal journey which causes him to lose his family and identity. Also he forgets the feeling of love and care throughout the memoir.
Hate begins to grow, and in the case of the Holocaust, this incessant hatred led to the identification of all Jews, the deportation of millions of people from their homes, the concentration in the camps, and extermination of entire families and communities at once. For nearly a decade, Jews, prisoners-of-war, homosexuals, and the disabled were rounded up, sent off to camps, and systematically slaughtered in unimaginably inhumane ways. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, shares his experiences at Auschwitz in the book Night, which reveals the true extent of inhumanity in both the Nazis and the Jews. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, Wiesel uses imagery of his experiences before and while being in the concentration camp in order to develop his theme of dehumanization of both the Jews and the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Elie Wiesel once said, “I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it ”. To Wiesel, it seemed impossible the dreadful events of the Holocaust could indeed happen and be accepted. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel recalls his experiences while imprisoned as a young Jewish boy during World War II. ELiezer, the young Wiesel, is seized from is small Transylvanian town and transported the the concentration camp Birkenau. This story describes the harshness and cruelty of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the effects that those environments had on the imprisoned Jews.
Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for his book “Night,” survived through some of the harshest conditions mankind has ever seen. Separated from his mother and sisters at the Auschwitz concentration camp, he and his dad had to keep each other alive while they were being held captive by the Nazi’s. Elie had to manage to survive off of little food, forced labor, and other inhumane living conditions. In the book “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, is affected by the events in this book by losing faith, becoming less sympathetic, and changing emotionally.