Imagine being nothing more than a number and having to suffer tremendously for months at a very young age. This idea of dehumanization became a reality when Adolf Hitler started the war of a century, the Holocaust. He and his followers, the Nazis, killed six million Jews and started up over 44,000 concentration camps which is where the manual labor and starvation occurred. Eliezer Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust and shared his personal experience through his memoir, Night. It also describes the concept of dehumanization being applied to himself, his father and everyone else. They did this by assaulting them, execution, and murder with no remorse. In his novel, Elie describes a time when he was punished. His memory starts when he and …show more content…
Not too long after their arrival in the camp, Elie found himself watching his father get severely abused by a supervisor, Idek. They were loading diesel motors onto freight cars when Idek exploded with rage and took it out on Elie’ father. Elie said “And he began beating him with an iron bar” (Weisel 54). At first Elie’s father was curling up in pain trying to stay strong but eventually the pain got to him and he cracked. Another way Elie’s father suffered was when he was sick. As a sick man, he was forced into a cattle car with at least a hundred others, and was sent to a different camp. He had dysentery (an infection of the intestines that causes diarrhea containing blood or mucus) and also suffered from starvation. It got worse and worse until their was blood, trickling out of his mouth. Elie said “Saliva mixed with blood tickling from his lips. He had closed his eyes. He was gasping for more than breathing ""My father is sick… Dysentery””(Weisel 108). The doctors at the camp did nothing to help. They left Elie’s father to suffer and continue to slowly die. Watching and listening to people die became a normal experience and something that occurred daily. Everyone in camp suffered, and nobody outside
He had had many challenges before this like losing his belief in god and getting separated from people he loved. He had been taking care of his father for a while before he passed. One night as the SS guards were checking the barracks as Elie was trying to take care of his father they told him to be quiet. Elie's father was trying to get him to get him some water instead of soup, however Elie wasn't able to meet those needs and was trying to keep him quiet. The SS officer hit Elie's father across the face with his ballet.
The dehumanization of the Jews Dehumanization was a cruel weapon that happened to the Jewish civilians during the Holocaust in Elie Wiesel’s, Night. How were the Jews being dehumanized? They were starved, forced to march, forced into cattle cars, beaten, malnourished, and had their rights taken away. However, that was the “normal” treatment for a Jew. It was normal to beat innocent humans, it was normal to starve them, and it was normal to make sure that they had no happiness.
Millions of people were brutally abused by the Nazis, forcing them to resort to beastly ways. Hitler, the Nazi party leader, had a master plan of dehumanizing and crushing the entire Jewish population. Until the liberation of the Jews, he had a successful run. Hitler dehumanized Jews by way of starvation, physical abuse, and verbal abuse. This theme can be seen very clearly in “Night” by Elie Weisel.
From 1941-1945 over 6 million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was one of few who survived these horrors. He wrote about his experiences in his book Night. In this scene from Night by Elie Wiesel, he and dozens of others have been stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and people are throwing bread into the cars to watch the people in the cars fight for it. Wiesel explores dehumanization to demonstrate how changed people become because of the horrors that they had seen and experienced.
Dehumanization can be defined as demonizing the enemy or making someone seem less than human and unworthy of humane treatment. However, in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, dehumanization has a more significant meaning. Throughout the memoir, the Nazis not only dehumanize the Jewish people but also take their identity, family, and values. They steal their clothes, shave their hair, remove their names, and force them to fight against each other like wolves for just a crust of bread merely for their amusement. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie is dehumanized by having his name taken away from him, and having his head shaved making him look the same as everyone around him, which causes Eliezer to question death, give up hope and give up faith in himself and others around him.
Wiesel also writes develops the theme of dehumanization in order to convey that the Nazi’s had consumed the feeling of humanity of the Jews. There were many acts that dehumanized the Jews which included starvation, beatings, murders, separation of families, theft of their belongings, and other things. Throughout the book, dehumanization grows and slowly exhausts the Jews until they have all sense of being human. After hearing about the bombing of the Buna factory, Wiesel writes, “We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it would have claimed hundreds of inmates’ lives.
The Holocaust is one of the most gruesome, tragic, and cruel events in the history of mankind. The leader of the Nazi regime, known as Hitler, sought to rid the world of Jews. He failed rather than prevailed, but he has left trauma for countless people that will transcend generations. Regardless, this led to the mass murder of millions of Jews and yet resonates today. Elie Wiesel's memoir vividly captures the heinous conduct during this horrid time.
During their journey, many of the Jews were shot because they could not keep up, and while the sound of the Nazi guns rang through the air, they were reminded of how little their lives meant to their captors. Once they made it to the next camp, they were treated as if they were dead. They were thrown onto the ground, lying on top of people while more people were thrown on top of them. While they had no way of knowing if these people were alive or not, they were, at this point, accustomed to death. When Elie was crushed under the weight of others, he was unable to think of anyone but himself, not able to make himself care about the lives of others.
When they approached Elie’s father he was cold and still. Elie was panicked, insisting he was still alive and resorting to hitting him, desperately trying whatever he could to wake him. “And I started to hit him harder and harder. At last, my father half opened his eyes. They were glassy.
[He] was dragging [his] skeletal body which weighed so much” (81). Prisoners were forced to run death marches when a concentration camp was possibly going to be invaded, so they would have to run over forty miles with no resources and would have to trample over dead bodies. This proves how physically tooling and nearly impossible these runs were because there were large amounts of prisoners who dropped dead. Elie endured all of this pain to the point where his body was physically dying off. Elie barely obtained any food or water and he had to experience immense beatings and torture, resulting in his own body
Elie had difficult time in the camp. His father was very ill and ost of the time elie would give him his swoop because he was sick. Elie father had dysentery a terrible disease that back in the days there was a cure for it yet. This made you have a dry mouth and just won't make you want to eat but just drink water, If you drink water you were basically killing yourself from the inside. He trying giving his father his own food and mainly because he didn't want to see his father in this condition.
In Night. People in concentration camps tried to protect each other but struggled very hard to do so. Sometimes, they barely had a chance to begin with. For example, Elie witnessed someone kill himself because they already committed all he had left to taking care of a family member and was stuck. “A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father?
The empathy he felt for his father is what drove him to stay alive, to fight for his life. Without his father, he would have given into exhaustion long before the American tanks arrived at the camp. Elie's father gave him strength, therefore giving him resilience. Strong people are resilient people; it took everything Elie had to keep himself alive. In the times he wanted so badly just to lie down, to give up it was his father's presence which kept him alive.
On the subject of this, the first experience of dehumanization Wiesel experienced was when he and his family were forced into wagons packed with other innocent jews and he says, “After two days of travel, thirst became intolerable, as did the heat” (Wiesel 23). For two days, eighty jews were packed together like sardines on train wagons with no food or water. This horrified me on how the Nazis treated them like prisoners guilty of crimes that justified their own actions against the Jews. The three stages of dehumanization, which is mental, physical, and emotional, were represented throughout the memoir. Mental dehumanization was the stage in which saddened me the most.
Suffering not only forces people to make inhumane decisions but it also causes people to lose hope and give up on themselves. In this section of the book, Elie describes a time where he was devastated to see his father beaten and hurt in the camps. Throughout his time in the camps, Elie saw and heard the abuse that was given to people in the camp killing his hope. The biggest turning point in the story was when he saw his father getting beat. When Idek “began beating [Elie’s father] with an iron bar … [Elie’s] father simply doubled over under the blows, but then [Elie's father] seemed to break in two like an old tree struck by lightning”