Armenian Genocide In Elie Wiesel's Night

Survivors of many different genocides find uncanny similarities within their experiences. Elie Wiesel writes about his experiences growing up as a Jewish boy during the Holocaust in his memoir titled Night, which can be compared to numerous other historical events that happened to other groups of people. Many of the incidents described by Wiesel correlate with the horrific actions the Christian Armenians experienced during their persecution in 1915. The two minorities were severely mistreated and victimized by their perpetrators in similar ways, which makes these two genocides comparable. In fact, there have been suspicions that Adolf Hitler himself based some of his strategies off of tactics used in the Armenian Genocide. During an address

They mistreated and abused the captives. One of the many ways the Ottomans and Nazis used to torture their prisoners was the use of death marches, long-distance marches that were used as a means of killing off the weak. The Jews and the Armenians suffered in different conditions: the Jews had to endure the extreme cold of German winter, and the Armenians suffered extreme heat in the Syrian desert. Elie Wiesel wrote, "We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death… I was walking through a cemetery” (Wiesel 89). It was extremely difficult to survive these marches, between the physical torture and the loss of the will to live experienced by these prisoners, and as Wiesel said, it was like walking through a cemetery. Likewise, in the Armenian Genocide, death and other forms of abuse were commonplace. The Armenians, like the Jews, were not well fed, but things like robbery, rape, and torture were more frequent with the Armenians (Whitehorn). Physical torture was common during these genocides, but psychological abuse was in effect as well. The governments took everything from the captives: their lives, happiness, and belongings. The CUP, also known as the Young Turks, took all the money and properties in Turkish Armenian

The tactics used by their perpetrators were purposeful and cruel, and that translates into their inhumane methods of killing. One of the ways each group was murdered was during sporadic ambushes, usually occurring in remote locations like woodlands. Elie Wiesel mentioned one of these ambushes in the beginning of his novel, saying, “The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks… They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs” (Wiesel 6). He then went on to say that the Gestapo shot and killed the prisoners, who were forced to dig their own graves prior. Very similar events happened in the Armenian Genocide as well, when Armenians were transported to a forest where a similar, but more violent massacre took place. “...hundreds of chetes attacked from all sides, cutting and hacking off legs and arms and necks... Then the bodies were thrown half alive... into prepared ditches..."(Balakian 84). In both instances, the killings were brutal, but the latter being significantly more gory. Both attacks were premeditated, hence the transportation and the ditches, and the officials conducting these ambushes seem to have no sympathy towards the victims, as expressed in their killing methods. If that wasn’t cruel enough, both the Nazis and Ottomans scarcely and poorly fed their prisoners, a deliberate plan to