The Dark Side At the beginning of the Holocaust, there were over 10,000,000 Jews across the world. However, by the end of the Holocaust, only a measly 4 million Jews were left, meaning 60% of the population perished. German soldiers did awful things throughout the Holocaust, such as slaughtering babies with no remorse and stripping people from their families. One of the most dehumanizing actions was that Germans would remove people from their homes and force them into concentration camps. Elie Wiesel, a young boy from a Jewish town, is forced to face that horror when the entire population is marched into the concentration camps by the Nazis. Even when the odds were against him, young Elie Wiesel survived the Holocaust and found out the truth …show more content…
The memoir reveals the transformative and dark aspects of human nature exposed under extreme conditions, demonstrating how ordinary people can commit atrocious acts in the name of self-preservation, ideology, and survival. As humans, we are normally inclined to nurture and care for babies and children; however, the German soldiers showed no sign of any care or compassion as they threw Jewish children into fires. As Elie first arrives at Auschwitz, he is assaulted by the sight of “the small faces of the children whose bodies [he] saw transformed into smoke” (Wiesel 49). “Every [Jew] was weeping” (Wiesel 49) at the dreadful sight; the German soldiers acted as if it were normal. This shows that, in certain circumstances, humans can do awful things. Hitler told the Germans that the Jews were ruining their country, so when the Nazis committed mass genocide, they believed they were doing what was right for their country. This is an example of how humans can do great evil without viewing it as evil. Throughout the memoir, the Nazi officers commit a plethora of atrocious deeds; however, some Jews also fall into the corrupt side of human