The barbarism displayed towards Jewish people in concentration camps is evidently present in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night: one wrong move, one failed selection, one sign of humanity, and they have a one-way trip to the crematorium. The novel Night is a testimony about the author, Elie Wiesel, and his experiences in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. To take a deeper look at the atrocities demonstrated within this novel, one must first understand how the Schutzstaffel (SS) dehumanized the Jews. Dehumanization plays an immense role in the novel, as it portrays the wickedness of the concentration camps that Elie and many others had to endure. Elie Wiesel’s testimony illustrates the physical abuse towards the prisoners, the animalistic treatment …show more content…
The passage states, “They lived for each other, body and soul,” signaling that the SS had eradicated everything that the two brothers lived for—most notably, their family. As a result, the brothers have been dehumanized to the point where they only have each other left to live for. Additionally, Elie begins questioning the morality of the ‘Master of the Universe,’ after enduring the loss of family: “Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces” (Wiesel 67)? Elie has seen it all: men tortured day and night, families being torn apart, and the remainder of what is left of the family ending up in a furnace. The SS has done such a horrifyingly proficient job at stripping the Jews of their humanity through the disintegration of families that some Jews, like Elie, are beginning to question if God really is on their side; they simply cannot believe that an almighty being would allow such cruelty to