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. They did this by assaulting them, execution, and murder with no remorse.
In his novel, Elie describes a time when he was punished. His memory starts when he and
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Not too long after their arrival in the camp, Elie found himself watching his father get severely abused by a supervisor, Idek. They were loading diesel motors onto freight cars when Idek exploded with rage and took it out on Elie’ father. Elie said “And he began beating him with an iron bar” (Weisel 54). At first Elie’s father was curling up in pain trying to stay strong but eventually the pain got to him and he cracked. Another way Elie’s father suffered was when he was sick. As a sick man, he was forced into a cattle car with at least a hundred others, and was sent to a different camp. He had dysentery (an infection of the intestines that causes diarrhea containing blood or mucus) and also suffered from starvation. It got worse and worse until their was blood, trickling out of his mouth. Elie said “Saliva mixed with blood tickling from his lips. He had closed his eyes. He was gasping for more than breathing ""My father is sick… Dysentery””(Weisel 108). The doctors at the camp did nothing to help. They left Elie’s father to suffer and continue to slowly die. Watching and listening to people die became a normal experience and something that occurred daily. Everyone in camp suffered, and nobody outside