In the memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel he recounts the horrors that occurred during the holocaust. The holocaust happened between the years 1933 and 1945. During that time, the jews were subjected to terrible, inhumane treatment. Hitler wanted to remove all jews from the death camps. He also killed most of jews by the end of 1945.
The Dehumanization of Jews Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to little more than things. In Night By, Elie Wiesel, Eliezer, his father, and the other Jews were dehumanized over time to they became nothing to the SS officers. In the first part of Night Moshe the Beadle was thrown onto the first load of cattle cars and sent off. ( Night pg. 6) “They stopped the cattle car that Moshe was on, and the officers made the Jews dig a big trench and then the shot and killed them.
In addition, through this memoir, Wiesel also provided us a true definition of what dehumanisation when Elie got separated from his family. Wiesel portrays the emotion that Elie was having when he and his father was separated from his mother "Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother." Through the expression that Wiesel describe Elie we can see how cruelty and dehumanisation were the Germans to the Jewish people. They were making all the Jewish separated to many sections in the camp "Men to the left, women to the right." Wiesel also provided us the information that anything can happen in the camp to the Jewish people.
In the memoir Elie Wiesel writes about how the jew were tortured and worked till exhaustion and dehumanized in the Nazi concentration camps.
The bond between a father and a son is perhaps a thing of beauty. It is sometimes what bonds them together to survive horrible occasions, such as the Holocaust that Elie Wiesel and his father went through. Throughout the march to the Birkenau concentration camps, some sons and fathers took advantage of their father's’ old age and used it to steal or betray them. This displays how dehumanization plays a role in breaking apart a family bond that was instilled in their hearts on their first days of humanity.
“The Hungarian police burst into every Jewish home in town: a Jew was henceforth forbidden to own gold, jewelry, or any valuables”(p10 & 11).This memoir is discussing about the dehumanization of Jews by a man named Elie Wiesel who has survived the holocaust. The process of getting rid of Jews began in 1944 starting by grabbing any valuables Jews have and forcing them to wear stars on them. When Jews don’t have any valuables and making them wear the stars , the Jews can’t buy anything showing that Jews are weak and poor and they are just people that should not be in this world. “The yellow star? So what?
Wiesel also writes develops the theme of dehumanization in order to convey that the Nazi’s had consumed the feeling of humanity of the Jews. There were many acts that dehumanized the Jews which included starvation, beatings, murders, separation of families, theft of their belongings, and other things. Throughout the book, dehumanization grows and slowly exhausts the Jews until they have all sense of being human. After hearing about the bombing of the Buna factory, Wiesel writes, “We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it would have claimed hundreds of inmates’ lives.
Dehumanization can be described as “depriving a person of positive human qualities” (Oxford Language). Elie Weisel in Night shows how dehumanized people were during the Holocaust. From examining the words and the actions of the SS officers, it is clear that dehumanization was a big part of Elies life during the Holocaust. Elie Weizel encountered dehumanization from the SS officers. His time in the concentration camps led him to encounter dehumanization constantly through things he was called.
The memoir, Night, written by author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, details his harrowing experiences during World War II. At this time, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, took control of Germany and its surrounding areas, eventually establishing concentration camps to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution: the systematic murder of European Jews and any other minority deemed unfit for life in Nazi Germany. Elie Wiesel, originally taken to Auschwitz, managed to survive the horrors, and dedicated the rest of his life to sensitizing the world to the atrocities he, and so many others, experienced. Specifically in Night, Wiesel depicts the efforts the Nazis made to dehumanize the Jews, and how these efforts affected the victims. Dehumanizing events such the loss of his home in Sighet, the arrival in Auschwitz, and
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.
There were many ways the Germans dehumanized the Jews. A few of them were beating, selecting, and starving them. Elie was affected as he eventually lost his basic humanity, felt like he wasn’t human anymore, and began losing his faith in God. The Jews faced a lot of tough experiences and had been through a lot, but the worst of them was the Germans beating the Jews. The Jews would get beat if they did anything that the Germans didn’t like or didn’t want.
For starters, when Eliezer and the other prisoners got to Auschwitz they were forced to get a tattoo of numbers, the only name the Nazi’s will call him. Miserably the Jews filed past a table, “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). This shows the dehumanization of Eliezer because now he is referred to as a number rather than a human being with a name. Another example of dehumanization occurs in the beginning when they were crammed into cattle cars.
On the subject of this, the first experience of dehumanization Wiesel experienced was when he and his family were forced into wagons packed with other innocent jews and he says, “After two days of travel, thirst became intolerable, as did the heat” (Wiesel 23). For two days, eighty jews were packed together like sardines on train wagons with no food or water. This horrified me on how the Nazis treated them like prisoners guilty of crimes that justified their own actions against the Jews. The three stages of dehumanization, which is mental, physical, and emotional, were represented throughout the memoir. Mental dehumanization was the stage in which saddened me the most.
Dehumanization diminishes the humanity of others into mere objects of indifference. Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, depicts the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a young, innocent Jewish boy. He recounts the horrors he’d witnessed, and the fragility of human decency in the face of suffering. Their dehumanized treatment began as Wiesel and the other captives were loaded onto cattle cars and deported out of Sighet. A cattle car is meant for animals, providing conditions that are too harsh for humans.
“We were incapable of thinking. Our senses numbed, everything faded into a fog. We no longer clung to anything.” (Wiesel 36) The Holocaust was a very harsh time to live in and stripped Jews of anything and everything they had.
