Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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. In Night, Elie and his father are forced into Nazi concentration camps and face elements of dehumanization, loss of faith, all while being in the depths of mass genocide. Wiesel conveys the

Throughout the entire story, Elie and his Father experience dehumanizing killing tactics of the Nazi’s, which begins to eat at their faith. In the concentration camps, Elie and his father are stripped of their identities, being dehumanized to only numbers. Dehumanization is when people are treated as less than human and more like that of an object or animal. Additionally, dehumanization is the first step within the cycle that leads to a loss of faith. During the Holocaust, those in concentration camps were forced to become numbers, giving up their names and identities, in Night, this happens to Elie. “The three “veterans,” with needles in their hands, engraved a number on their left arms. I have a A-7713. After that I had no other names.” (Wiesel 39) Readers can see that Elie had now become a number, no longer Elie, but now A-7713, a name that should be of an object rather than a human, marking the first step to the cycle and Elie’s lost identity. These same numbers eventually become life or death for the people inside the camps, as explored when Elie and his fellow prisoners were being selected to live, “Then came the ordinary prisoners’