Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

Lena Nielsen

Mrs. Woida

Honors English II

04 December 2023

Dehumanization in the Holocaust and the Massacre of Novgorod

In Russia, the word ‘pogrom’ (погром) is defined by Oxford Languages as “an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” It is translated directly as “devastation”. This word has made its way into the English language as well, referring to the devastation of the Holocaust. The novella Night details the firsthand experience of being a Hungarian Jewish young man in 1944 taken to concentration camps in the Holocaust, written by Elie Wiesel. He was crammed into cattle cars for days on end only to reach the burning

He experienced the brutal losses of his family, along with everything he owns, his faith, and almost his sanity. Many hundreds of miles away in 1570, a Russian tzar named Ivan IV Vasilyevich, better known now as Ivan the Terrible from an arguably more accurate mistranslation of his title “The Severe”, waged a massacre on the independently-minded city of Novgorod, lasting only five weeks yet leaving thousands dead; though the city’s population could not have been more than 100,000, around 30,000 were murdered, leaving 20,000 more to perish from the aftermath (Erenow, “Massacre- Ivan The Terrible”). Most buildings were destroyed and the greatness of Novgorod was no longer. Together, the factor of dehumanization in the Holocaust and in the massacre of Novgorod was a similarity between the two. Each devastating event had its own psychological tactics intended for dehumanization, had links between an individual’s

For some, the abuse took root in their own heads, thus leading the victims to think of themselves just as the abuser intended; for others, they didn’t live long enough to face the effects. When Ivan the Terrible came to Novgorod, after several days of small killings and some humiliation of certain figures of the community, he ordered the people of Novgorod to be bound at the neck and/or legs, tied to sleds, to be “dragged across the snow to the wooden bridge across the Volkhov River to await their punishment” (Erenow, “Massacre- Ivan The Terrible”). This describes the most well-known torture and way of death Ivan IV used in Novgorod. Once these villagers were thrown either off the bridge itself or a higher platform built upon it, they- who of course couldn’t swim away, bound in the literally-freezing water- were greeted by a horrible sight. Ivan IV’s private police, the oprichniki, were below the bridge, sitting completely armed in boats. When the villagers sank in the water and rose again, flailing desperately, the oprichniki chopped them up (along with other, similar cruelties); the bodies sank once more (Erenow, “Massacre- Ivan The Terrible''). Having no say in this brutality tens of thousands of them died terrible deaths, some just like this and others so different. Conversely, Night shows us the side of trauma from dehumanization