Effects Of Night By Elie Wiesel

People who made it out of the holocaust may have survived, but at what cost. Survivors were left with horrors of their pasts and scars on their bodies that are daily reminders of what they have been through. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie talks about his personal experience while at the concentration camps. He includes all the horrors he went through and how dehumanized he felt. The article “Less Than Human: The psychology of cruelty” by David Livingstone Smith also explains the torture the inmates had to go through and the extent of just how awful this event was. Eli and the other inmates at the camp are physically dehumanized during their experience at the camps which heavily impacts their bodies, relationships, and mental states.

In an article titled, “Less than Human: The Psychology of Cruelty” by David Livingstone Smith, he explains how people in the camp were “treated worse than animals” (Smith). Inmates within these camps were treated as if they weren’t even human beings. They were treated so horribly during these times that comparing them to being treated like animals doesn't even show the full extent of how they were treated. Another piece of evidence front the article that talks about how much their bodies were impacted is the torture they had to endure: “Doctors made incisions in their flesh to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them”(Smith). These people were treated as test subjects with no one having any remorse for the pain they were going through. It is hard to even grasp how much their bodies had to undergo during this time. The inmates were so physically dehumanized and had their bodies go through so much during this

In the book Night, Elie and his father had a very close relationship with each other, but after spending time in the camp things changed. Towards the end, Elie’s father eventually dies, and although he was grieving a little bit, he also felt “Free at last!” (Wiesel 112). If Elie never went to the camp, he would have never felt this relief when his father died. However, it was hard to try and take care of his sick dad and survive himself, which is why he felt this relief that he would not have normally felt. Another father-son relationship that was affected was between inmates that were on the train. Everyone was starving on this train, so each piece of food was very important, and because of this people were willing to do anything for it: “Don’t you recognize me… you’re killing your father”(Wiesel 101). The father had a piece of bread in his hand, so the son was willing to do anything for it, even kill his own father. This would have never happened if they weren’t that dehumanized in the camp. Killing your own father and feeling relief when your father dies just shows how long they haven’t been treated as humans and how this affected their relationships with