Dehumanization In Elie Wiesel's Night

Dehumanization in Night

Innocent people change gruesomely when they are stripped of their humanity. Elie Wiesel’s Night narrates the author’s struggles to survive the Nazi party’s attempted annihilation of the Jewish people during WWII. Elie describes in his testimony that the Nazis seperate those under attack from their sense of humanity by treating them as worthless chores to empower their apathetic methods of genocide. An article elaborates that for those under persecution, “there is no soul, no self. Only a number...The treatment of A-7713 involves dehumanization.” (Brown 75). In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Nazis dehumanized the Jews with the intent to prevent Jewish people from resisting their tyrannical orders. Unfortunately, dehumanization

Elie recalls that while in the large ghetto, the Nazi-led captors begin to starve the Jews: “We had spent the day without food…we were exhausted” (15). The Nazi treatment of the Jews in the camps introduces the recurring theme of dehumanization that affects the Jewish people. Depriving the inhabitants of food for a day was an intentional, calculated maneuver completed with the intent to weaken those in the camps. The Nazis belived that the town would be too hungry to disobey orders and consequently would be easier to manipulate. Starving the people to force them to follow is a strategy that views the Jewish people as animals, which detaches them from their sense of humanity. Starvation is the first form of dehumanization that the Jews face, and ultimately puts them in a state to be taken advantage

The Nazis abuse this power when they force the fatigued Jewish people to run to the small ghetto, as Elie writes of their terror, “the police were lashing out with their clubs: ‘faster!’ I had no strength left” (19). The Nazis waited until those in the camps were starved and then hurried people away. Rather than recognizing that they were people with homes, the Nazis treated the Jews as though they were simply animals in a pen, and hurried them from place to place. An analysis of the book explains that the Nazis treated the Jewish people without humanity because they were seen as a task and not people since the officers were “Arriving with orders to exterminate an estimated 600,000 Jews in six weeks or less” ("Elie(zer) Wiesel" 6). This is a direct example the dehumanization the Nazis employ to meet their agenda. Dehumanization occurs with the intent to force cooperation and force those under it’s effects to