In the memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel written in 1991. In this story the Jews are dehumanized in chapter 1, 2, and 3. The holocaust started around 1993. You may wonder why and what Hitlers goal was in planning this. On the website https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ it states that his plan was to annihilate the Jews of europe. The genocide of the Jews was a culminaion of a decade of German police. The Jews were dehumanized in many different ways. One way they were dehumanized was by the Hungarian police and they were yelling “Faster, Faster! Move, you lazy good- for nothing!” This is showing dehumanization because they are yelling at them how people yell at animals when they are in their way. It is also dehumanizing because they are making
Dehumanization during the Holocaust According to a 2022 article published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nazi racism resulted in the persecution and mass murder of six million Jews and millions of other people.” Before World War II, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany where he sparked Nazism and started the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an attempt to rid the world of Jews, since Hitler was convinced they were an inferior and parasitic race. Not only were Jews killed by the Nazis, but they were also dehumanized. This dehumanization was done through things such as separating families, taking away belongings, inflicting poor hygiene and starvation, treatment like animals, and gas chambers.
Throughout the Holocaust, the Nazis oppressed and dehumanized the Jews. Dehumanization is the process of removing a person’s human characteristics to make them feel less human. Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, highlights the terrible treatment the Jews and himself sustained during the Holocaust which caused them to lose their human characteristics. Dehumanization is a recurring theme in the memoir and readers will understand how it has progressed and affected the mental and physical health of Jews.
Dehumanization is a psychological phenomenon that characterizes individuals with wholly negative connotations sequentially, encouraging violence and haterade toward them. Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir that embraces the consequences of dehumanization; it paints the reader with the reality of someone who experienced being a direct target of whole-hearted antagonism. In this essay, I intend to shed light on the horrendous tactics the Nazis used to control Elie, his father, and everyone involved. In addition, I will dismantle how Elie Wiesel's personality shifts before and after the events of the Holocaust. Upon first arriving, German troops wasted no time barking their perilous commands to the residences of Siget, Transylvania.
In the memoir Night by Ellie Wiesel, he describes the events of surviving the holocaust and going to Auschwitz. Elie was born in Hungary, Once Hitler's forces arrived, there he was sent to the ghetto. Soon they get sent on trains to Auschwitz where he is separated from his mother and sisters. He gets transferred from camp to camp until the end of the war when he is freed by the Red Army. Elie Wiesel and his prison mates have experienced terrible things throughout their experience with the Nazis in the concentration camps, eventually degrading them and dehumanizing them.
The book Night By Elie Wiesel , Elie Wiesel tells the story of how he was sent to a concentration camp called Auschwitz, he struggles to keep his faith throughout all the terrible violent things that have happened to him. He also witnessed his fellow prisoners lose their faith and humanity throughout this awful experience. Elie Wiesel was sent to the concentration camps with his father, mother, and three sisters; most of his family died except his two older sisters that he soon met up with later in his life. Elie and his father went through so many terrible acts that the SS men did to them while in the concentration camps. During his time in the camp Elie and his fellow prisoners were constantly dehumanized and they were made to feel like they had no place in the world.
“Meir Katz was moaning: Why don't they just shoot us now?” (Wiesel 103). This shows how the harsh conditions and punishment of the Nazi officers dehumanize the jewish prisoners in concentration camps. It is the process of dehumanization that made possible the evils of the Holocaust and makes possible the smaller evils that occur on a daily basis. The Nazi guards, as revealed in the Elie Wiesel memoir, Night, were able to victimize their prisoners because the process of dehumanization desensitized them to the evils they inflicted.
Dehumanization is a theme that was heavily explored throughout the progression of Night, and especially through Elies experiences at different concentration camps.. The first instance of horrible cruelty shown at the camps starts as early as his arrival at Birkenau, where Elie and his family first arrive after leaving Sighet. Within Elie’s first day at the camp, he already began to see the horrors of the concentration camps. As soon as he arrives, he is stripped away from his family and is forced into wooden barracks, where he is beaten by the kapos and forced to run in the blistering cold without any clothing. After this, they are all forced back into the barracks, where they are given some clothes which don’t fit most of them.
Lena Nielsen Mrs. Woida Honors English II 04 December 2023 Dehumanization in the Holocaust and the Massacre of Novgorod In Russia, the word ‘pogrom’ (погром) is defined by Oxford Languages as “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” It is translated directly as “devastation”. This word has made its way into the English language as well, referring to the devastation of the Holocaust. The novella Night details the firsthand experience of being a Hungarian Jewish young man in 1944 taken to concentration camps in the Holocaust, written by Elie Wiesel.
Stripped of Humanity Have you ever imagined losing everything that makes you who you are? That's what happened to Elie, and his family as well as all Jew that lived during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel memoir called “Night” take us into his life as a young Jewish boy during that time. He describes the horrors that he and his fellow Jews had to go through during the Holocaust as well as the deaths of his family. He describes the harsh and inhumane living conditions that prisoners were forced to endure in concentration camps.
Avoid the habit of staying silent, especially when discussing brutal events that shouldn't be repeated, such as dehumanization, which is the act of separating someone of all the characteristics that make them uniquely human, such as uniqueness, soul, and identity. In the eyes of the Nazis, the majority of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps were in an equal position. Some prisoners did survive in the camps but they completely lost themselves while trying to return home. We refer to the Jews who were detained in camps as prisoners, but the Nazi regime treated them no better than animals. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel writes about the dehumanization of "imperfect" people, particularly Jews, who had their identities taken away from them and were either put to death (a practice known as the "Final Solution" developed by Adolf Hitler) or felt lost after their survival, but who were also treated like animals before being put to death.
Six million Jewish prisoners were dehumanized, abused, and murdered from 1933 to 1945. Elie Wiesel wrote about his experiences as one of these Jewish prisoners, in Night, the tree imagery helps convey the physical, emotional, and spiritual toll that dehumanization takes on the Jewish prisoners. First, the tree imagery illustrates the physical toll on Elie, his father, and the other Jewish prisoners. Idek is in a bad mood and beat Elie’s father with an iron bar: “At first my father simply doubled under the blows, but then he seemed to break in two like an old tree struck by lightning.
The Holocaust took place from July 30, 1933, to May 8, 1945. The Jews lived those 12 years in torture and suffering, controlled by the atrocious SS guards. They were treated in such an inhumane way and the SS guards were really difficult for them. Elie Wiesel was one of the prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II and had experienced the Holocaust. He wrote the book “Night” about his Psychological journey that focuses on the dehumanization of the Jews and how the people changed from civilized humans to vicious beings with animal like behavior.
(Source 4) Hitler wanted to exterminate all of the ‘inferior races’ so that Germany could take over Europe and house the ‘perfect race’. The Jews were looked down on as they were inferior to the Germans that they lived amongst and therefore were ridiculed and made vulnerable to persecution. Hitler was afraid that the Jews would summon the other ‘inferior’ races to rise up against the Nazi regime as they were believed to hold much of the world’s finances and mass media. (Source 4) They believed that killing the Jews
The tragic events of the Holocaust began when Adolf Hitler came to power. He tortured and killed Jews, homosexuals and gypsies because of their beliefs. The Nazis believe that the Jews posed as a threat to the German civilization so they discriminated them for years. They were forced to work on labor camps (concentration camps) and beaten if they attempted to withhold from pain. Furthermore, they faced starvation and illnesses, which also contributed to their deaths.
In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.