Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person, or group of people, of their unalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From the beginning of the Holocaust, the Jews were the target of inequitable treatment from their German and allied persecutors. They were segregated from other races, seen more like animals than people, and tormented a great deal. In 1944, Wiesel describes his first sight of German soldiers in Sighet; he insisted that despite the Jewish people’s expectations, “first impressions of the Germans were most reassuring.” Eventually, the Jewish people were given a different set of rules than others, requiring them to stay in their houses, give up all possessions of value, and wear a yellow …show more content…
Overcrowded and underfed, they finally reached Birkenau, their destination. Immediately the Jews are treated less than human as evident by Elie Wiesel’s father attempting to communicate with an overseer, “The gypsy looked him up and down slowly, from head to foot. As if he wanted to convince himself that this man addressing him was really a creature of flesh and bone, a living being with a body and a belly. Then as if he had suddenly woken up from a heavy doze, he dealt my father such a clout that he fell to the ground, crawling back to his place on all fours.” It appeared as though the Nazis viewed the Jewish people with extreme dislike or more accurately, a burning hatred. The Jews were seen as the route of all their problems, and they were deeply convinced most everything was this one race’s fault. With trials such as selection, countless Jewish lives were ended because they were considered too “weak” and did not meet the required expectations. Jewish children were traded through a pedophiliac trafficking scandal and most women were sent to the crematorium immediately as observed by Wiesel by a SS officer, “He gave the order: ‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion.” After experiencing all this so early on, Wiesel begins to realize that their enemies do not see killing them as wrong, they do not see them as