Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

Dehumanization in Night The one things that separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to see all others as part of humankind, and treat them as so. Night is the first person account of what happened to, then a boy of fifteen Elie Wiesel a Jewish Holocaust survivor. After the indescribable horrors caused by the Nazi’s treatment of people during World War Two, the United Nations created a document, called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to enlighten the world of “the rights which belong equally to every person” (1). This document clarified even more the wrongs of the Nazis during their reign and how their use of slavery, torture, degrading behaviors, and restriction on ownership of basic property were severely

Throughout Night the Jewish people are treated as less then human. Wiesel writes of how the Jews were spoken to, “On day, when we had just returned from the warehouse. I was summoned by the block secretary: ‘A-7713?’” (51). They were just a string of numbers, the officers made them to be nothing more than digits, not worth a name. This is one of the many that the Nazis tried to make the Jewish people feel worthless and degraded with psychological punishment. When the SS officers of Auschwitz take their prisoners on the infamous death march they use cruel comparisons, telling the Jews to run faster and calling then nothing but flea-ridden dogs (Wiesel 85). The mental harassment and punishment is intentional used to make the Jewish people to be stripped of their

Punishments are dealt freely and in some cases without real reasoning, rather as a way to inforce superiority of the oppressors. “I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip” (Wiesel 57). Young Wiesel is receives twenty-five lashes by a whip, for merely being at the wrong place at the wrong time when searching desperately for the possibility of a scrap of food. Cruel punishments for no crime torture to keep men silent. The lashes were used as a threat, torture to enforce that he is the slave, forced to work or die, and Idek as the Overseer, watching close with a whip and an iron fist. Article 17 states, “Everyone has the right to own property…No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property” (2). Whether that be a home, clothes, or precious processions every person has the right to own what is theirs. Wiesel writes of others losing their homes when the Jewish people are evacuated and thrusted into ghettos. “We gave some of our rooms to relatives” (17). The fact that many of Wiesel’s relatives were kicked out of their homes, deprived of their property and left with little to nothing when they were forced in to harsh conditions of the