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Dehumanization introduction
Nazi extermination of jewish people
Literature review on d theme of dehumanization
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¨ The- Germans were already in town, the fascist were already in power, the verdict had already been pronounced, yet the Jew of sight continued to smile ¨ ( Wiesel 18).The Holocaust was Adolf Hitlers plan to exterminate the European Jews. During world war ll six million Jews were massacred by the Nazis. The Jew was forced to a camp and the Nazi will also forced Jew to work to the death and if they seem too weak to work they will be executed. Also They made camp for the Jews for them to all stay in one place because the German believed the Jew was the cost for world war 1 and the jews was making the world to a worst place.
Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, documented the horrible and gruesome experiences that the Jewish people fo that time went through. Himself and the rest of the Jews were dehumanized while living at the concentration camps run by the Nazis all across Germany. Attacked by the Nazis, the Jews were being formed into the lowest form of life on Earth. Their families taken from them, personal belongings either taken or destroyed, and finally their hopes and beliefs were demolished. The Jews were divided into categories based on their overall health.
In the memoir “Night” by Elie Wiesel written in 1991. In this story the Jews are dehumanized in chapter 1, 2, and 3. The holocaust started around 1993. You may wonder why and what Hitlers goal was in planning this. On the website https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/ it states that his plan was to annihilate the Jews of europe.
“Meir Katz was moaning: Why don't they just shoot us now?” (Wiesel 103). This shows how the harsh conditions and punishment of the Nazi officers dehumanize the jewish prisoners in concentration camps. It is the process of dehumanization that made possible the evils of the Holocaust and makes possible the smaller evils that occur on a daily basis. The Nazi guards, as revealed in the Elie Wiesel memoir, Night, were able to victimize their prisoners because the process of dehumanization desensitized them to the evils they inflicted.
In the memoir Night by Ellie Wiesel, he describes the events of surviving the holocaust and going to Auschwitz. Elie was born in Hungary, Once Hitler's forces arrived, there he was sent to the ghetto. Soon they get sent on trains to Auschwitz where he is separated from his mother and sisters. He gets transferred from camp to camp until the end of the war when he is freed by the Red Army. Elie Wiesel and his prison mates have experienced terrible things throughout their experience with the Nazis in the concentration camps, eventually degrading them and dehumanizing them.
In Hitler’s anti-semitic book, “Mein Kampf,” he states the frightening words, “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” (Hitler 293-296) In this sentence, Hitler expresses his hatred/disgust towards the Jewish religion and all who are related to it, setting the stage for the terrors of the Holocaust. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel and his father experience life in concentration camps and see Hitler’s hatred firsthand. Night is a written account of the Holocaust, directly from a survivor, Elie Wiesel.
Imagine being nothing more than a number and having to suffer tremendously for months at a very young age. This idea of dehumanization became a reality when Adolf Hitler started the war of a century, the Holocaust. He and his followers, the Nazis, killed six million Jews and started up over 44,000 concentration camps which is where the manual labor and starvation occurred. Eliezer Wiesel is a survivor of the Holocaust and shared his personal experience through his memoir, Night. It also describes the concept of dehumanization being applied to himself, his father and everyone else.
Dehumanization during the Holocaust was the most condemnable factor as to how such cruel and inhumane acts could be brushed off as mere orders, brothers and sisters became feral towards one another, and how one’s body can become so isolated from the mind. It is difficult to imagine such horrid ideas as reality, much less as history, but Elie Wiesel describes all of these gruesome acts in Night, his autobiographical account of his experience during the Holocaust. The genocide of six million human beings is far from rational, and it seems like only monsters could be capable of such an act. The Nazi’s—however dificult it is to admit—are not monsters, but people, and a person can not kill one another with good conscience. In Night, one of Ellie’s
They had to carry heavy stones onto freight cars or else they would had to face beatings and death, as Wiesel states, "We loaded the heavy stones onto the freight cars" (73). Armed guards watched over the prisoners and threatened them with machine guns, as Wiesel describes, "Every few yards, there stood an SS man, his machine gun trained on us" (29). Jewish prisoners had no choice but to go on with these orders, or they would be killed. The constant fear of being killed and the requirement to work under dangerous and dehumanizing conditions highlight the extreme inhuman treatment of the Nazi regime towards the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
In “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie writes about numerous examples of the atrocities and acts of dehumanization committed during the holocaust and also writes about some redeeming moments that helped him to keep pushing and survive. When the story first starts out, Elie and the rest of the jews in sighet are living their everyday lives until one day the Germans come to town. Over the next few weeks, the Germans slowly but surely took control of sighet and began enforcing very strict laws. Then, everyone is shipped off to concentration camps by train, and somehow Elie and his father stick together through several concentration camps and numerous atrocities but eventually Elie's father dies. During this whole story, Elie is called “filthy dog”, he
Avoid the habit of staying silent, especially when discussing brutal events that shouldn't be repeated, such as dehumanization, which is the act of separating someone of all the characteristics that make them uniquely human, such as uniqueness, soul, and identity. In the eyes of the Nazis, the majority of Jewish prisoners in concentration camps were in an equal position. Some prisoners did survive in the camps but they completely lost themselves while trying to return home. We refer to the Jews who were detained in camps as prisoners, but the Nazi regime treated them no better than animals. In his autobiography Night, Elie Wiesel writes about the dehumanization of "imperfect" people, particularly Jews, who had their identities taken away from them and were either put to death (a practice known as the "Final Solution" developed by Adolf Hitler) or felt lost after their survival, but who were also treated like animals before being put to death.
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.
Dehumanization is a theme that was heavily explored throughout the progression of Night, and especially through Elies experiences at different concentration camps.. The first instance of horrible cruelty shown at the camps starts as early as his arrival at Birkenau, where Elie and his family first arrive after leaving Sighet. Within Elie’s first day at the camp, he already began to see the horrors of the concentration camps. As soon as he arrives, he is stripped away from his family and is forced into wooden barracks, where he is beaten by the kapos and forced to run in the blistering cold without any clothing. After this, they are all forced back into the barracks, where they are given some clothes which don’t fit most of them.
In what ways did the dehumanization of Jewish people impact their lives? The pieces of writing, Night by Elie Wiesel, “Five Chimneys” by Olga Lengyel, and the diary of Moshe Flinker all represent a prominent theme. The dehumanization of Jewish people causes their hopes to be diminished and people wanted to just die inside the ghettos and concentration camps. In the story Night, Elie Wiesel is a teenage boy trying to survive the Holocaust.
In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.
