From 1941-1945 over 6 million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was one of few who survived these horrors. He wrote about his experiences in his book Night. In this scene from Night by Elie Wiesel, he and dozens of others have been stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and people are throwing bread into the cars to watch the people in the cars fight for it. Wiesel explores dehumanization to demonstrate how changed people become because of the horrors that they had seen and experienced.
Elie Wiesel writes about how he and others had been dehumanized and acted more like animals from what they had suffered at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The men fight each other for the bread like “Beasts of prey unleashed, [with] animal hate in their eyes” (Wiesel, 101). Wiesel personifies the men's eyes with animal hate. The word animal specifically shows that the
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This shows how dehumanized they and everyone else had felt after being tortured and starved by the Germans. More and more people were throwing bread into the car watching “these emaciated creatures ready to kill for a crust of bread” (Wiesel, 101). The choice of the words emaciated creatures creates an animalistic tone, these people are focusing only on their own instincts and not making their decisions morally, willing to kill someone just to eat. Having people throw bread in the car just to watch makes them feel less human because others are using them as entertainment while they are just trying to survive. One old man had a piece of bread and as he was getting attacked he was saying “Meir, my little Meir!