Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Eli Wiesel

The Silenced Painful Lives On the assumption that you and everyone who lived around you were put in the situation to leave everything that you had in your life and have it thrown out to be treated like an animal, would you fight back to get everything you had before? Would you help the other people around you too? In the story Night by Eli Wiesel, we get the opportunity to see the perspective of the life of a 15-year-old during the Holocaust. Throughout the book Night, we see how Eli and numerous Jewish people pass through acts of dehumanization. Dehumanization is the act of depriving someone or a group of people and treating them as less human. As many people were not able to handle the pain and make it out alive there were still some survivors

They were forced to run by orders of the German soldiers. Then they were sent to shower rapidly with disinfection which seems very non-human-like to do. “A barrel of foul-smelling liquid stood by the door. Disinfection. Everybody soaked in it.” (Wiesel 36). This quote demonstrates that the Germans treated them as if they were some virus to take care of. The Jewish prisoners could not have regular showers only to be washed with some disinfection. Through this quote, readers can see the acts of dehumanization of being washed with something a person would not wash

The cattle carts would pass through German towns. Whenever they made a stop German Laborers would go to work and would stop to look at them as if it was some kind of zoo. For enjoyment, they’d throw rations of bread at them, “A crowd of workmen and curious passersby had formed all along the train. They had undoubtedly never seen a train with this kind of cargo. Soon, pieces of bread were falling into the wagons from all sides. And spectators observed these emancipated creatures ready to kill for a crust of bread.” (Weisel 101). This quote demonstrates that they were taken from their right to eat. A fundamental human right they couldn’t even have. They’d kill each other only for a piece of bread to