If you were to ask someone what the first number that comes to their head is when you say “Holocaust”, they would probably tell you 6 million, for the thousands of thousands of Jews killed. Maybe they say 11 million to include the 5 million people whose lives were also deemed worthless. Both of these are shocking numbers, but they don’t come about by accident. There is no butterfly effect or mishap that kills 11 million people, it is overwhelmingly intentional. The cornerstone strategy that allowed the Nazi party to carry out the largest genocide in human history was dehumanization. No German citizen, and not even Adolf Hitler, would support the large-scale, systematic murder of people they thought to be equal. The thorough dehumanization …show more content…
lie Wiesel’s experiences of dehumanization in the Nazi concentration camps extraordinarily influence his behavior and identity. During his time in the camps, Elie demonstrated extreme behavioral adaptations to survive the treatment; these were made possible by the erasing of his identity. Elie’s identity is established in the opening pages of the book. Elie is characterized as a deeply religious and intelligent person. His religion is more important to him than most, however, as he wants to study Kabbalah. As the German invasion looms closer, Elie remains focused on his studies, devoted fully to his faith. In the camps, Elie’s faith is immediately tested. As death seemed imminent Elie first began to question God, saying “Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?” (33). The design of the camps intentionally tested faith, forcing the Jewish prisoners to confront the dead and dying at all times. By straining this part of Elie’s identity, the process of dehumanization began. Later in the camps, Elie’s belongings, clothes, and hair are removed. In return he receives a number and a camp uniform. He has now lost his external identity, proceeding more …show more content…
Elie and his father were luckier than most, as they could stay together throughout the selection process. This became pivotal in helping Elie keep his humanity, but even that would begin to drift away. Slowly, Elie and his father grew apart. Here, his behavior began to change substantially. The first incident happened shortly after their arrival at the camp. Having been freshly dehumanized, a guard hit Elie’s father. What normally would have prompted a violent response from Elie to defend his family evoked nothing. Elie’s attachment to his father meant nothing in the face of dehumanization and deindividuation. This estrangement grows greater as they spend more time subjected the abuse of the camps. As his father gets beat while working in the camps, Elie remembers that “what's more, if I felt anger at that moment, it was not directed at the Kapo but at my father;” Elie asks “Why couldn't he have avoided Idek's wrath? That was what life in a concentration camp had made of me..." (54). Not only being complacent but also blaming his father for getting beaten by the Kapo is demonstrative of the influence of the Nazi’s dehumanization on Elie’s
One of the ways Elie felt dehumanized was when his father was abused by the head of the block. “ The Gypsy stared at him for a long time, from head and toe. As if he wished to ascertain that person addressing him was actually a creature of flesh and bone. ”pg 39
Plot: Elie Wiesel lived with his younger sister and parents in a small town during the period of World War Two. Where they were Jewish their fear of the German reaching them grew steadily until the German tanks rolled through their streets. Where the officers were nice, that did not stop them from setting up the ghetto’s in town square: “The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion” (12). Soon Wiesel found himself on a train to Auschwitz, where he was separated from his mother and sister, forced along with his father to join the other men at their camp. To work or to be burned, Elie and his father struggled to stay alive, on their rations of bread, but keeping fit enough to survive the test the leaders put on them.
As Elie and other inmates rest in a shed after a harsh and brutally cold winter walk, Rabbi Eliahu, a man Elie knew from Buna, asks Elie if he knows where his son went. Elie tells the rabbi he does not know, but then realizes his son left him intentionally and that “He had felt his father growing weaker and, believing that the end was near, he had thought by his separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival” (Wiesel, 91). The torture prisoners endured in the concentration camps desensitize them. It is astonishing that a boy left his father to die because he was too much of a burden. In the camps it was every man for himself and self- preservation came over family loyalty and commitment.
In his autobiography novel, “Night”, author Elie Wiesel writes about the horrors of his past, and towards the end he saw himself as a corpse when he looked upon the mirror which reflects his current state; he no longer believed in God’s goodness nor His justice. Elie Wiesel was a Jewish boy who had strong faith in God, but over the course of his life when he went through catastrophic events such as losing his mother, father, younger sister, starving, and being in concentration camps he declined God’s justice and blamed him for everything that was happening to him. In 1944 Elie and his family were deported to Auschwitz, a concentration camp, and that was where the horrors began. In the first instance, when Elie and his family arrived at the
In addition, through this memoir, Wiesel also provided us a true definition of what dehumanisation when Elie got separated from his family. Wiesel portrays the emotion that Elie was having when he and his father was separated from his mother "Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother." Through the expression that Wiesel describe Elie we can see how cruelty and dehumanisation were the Germans to the Jewish people. They were making all the Jewish separated to many sections in the camp "Men to the left, women to the right." Wiesel also provided us the information that anything can happen in the camp to the Jewish people.
Finally, interactions with others shape who people become by molding their personalities and feelings. Once again, Elie was shaped by his interactions with others, specifically the Nazi’s. Elie’s personality and feelings were also majorly affected by his interactions with the Nazi’s at the concentration camp he and his family were once trapped at. He underwent a major shift in personality: “Never shall I forget the Nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live,” (Wiesel 37). This quote demonstrates that Wiesel’s was shaped into a whole different version of himself, with an adapted personality and feeling due to brutal, human interactions.
Elie’s first reaction is to question is, “Why, but why would I bless [God]? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of Death?”(67). Elie witnesses horror on a level the world had not seen, let alone a 15 year old child.
The way the Germans are treating Elie makes him believe that God is no longer by his side and that faith is no longer helping him. Once more, Wiesel expresses how the Germans are dehumanizing the Jews is by stating, “I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but death itself, with death that he had already chosen”(105). The concentration camps have made Elie believe that death is undeniable and that he no longer can fight to stay alive.
Elie had been a firm believer in God, but when he experienced the atrocities of the Holocaust, it filled him with anger and doubt. He questioned why God had yet to save them, Elie questions “What are You, my God? I thought angrily. How do You com-pare to this stricken mass gathered to affirm to You their faith,their anger, their defiance? What does Your grandeur mean, Mas-ter of the Universe, in the face of all this cowardice, this decay, and this misery?
By forcing them to strip, the Jews are robbed of their clothes, their identity, and their dignity. Eliezer's father, a once proud and dignified man, is reduced to nothing more than his body, and his identity as a human being is stripped away. This event is significant because it marks the beginning of the Jews' degradation; it sets the tone for how they will be treated for the rest of their time in the camp. Elie Wiesel says “Our clothes were to be thrown on the floor at the back of the barrack. There was a pile there already.
Living in 1940s Europe during Word War two, changed Elie’s religious identity. From being a young boy with immense faith to questioning if god was even alive, then finally, going back to his faith because he had nothing better to believe in. As Elie goes through his time in the camp, the once very religious and eager to learn about god boy starts to lose his faith in god and his religion as a whole. As Elie was a young boy he wanted to learn everything about his religion that there was to learn, but his father was so focused on the wellbeing of others, that he did not care or notice.
Elie's faith is quickly questioned after the first night in the Auschwitz concentration camp, “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never” (34). When he arrives at Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp, he is instantly affected by the sights he and his father have observed, such as babies, family, and friends being burned into ashes, and his faith being consumed by the crematoria flames. Elie's first night at the concentration camp caused him to question God, making it difficult for him to understand why God would put him in such a place.
In Elie’s early teenage years he was an extremely religious person. Going to the Synagogue and wanting to study the Torah. As the Nazi’s captured Elie and his father and forced them into a concentration
my eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone, in a world without god” (67-68). Suddenly, Elie the previously dedicated worshipper began questioning, and even realizing the ridicule of praying and iterating his faith to God. God was the one who damned them into the death camps in the first place. God is the one who kept them there, devoid of any hope in liberation.
“I spent my days in total idleness. With only one desire: to eat. I no longer thought of my father, or my mother.” (Weisel 113) Elie lost many values during his times in Nazi concentration camps, and soon became a person that even he didn’t recognize.