Examples Of Individuality In Night By Elie Wiesel

How does a person become inhuman? The Holocaust is a well known and prime example of groups of people and ethnicities being treated inhumanely by taking them from their homes, sent to concentration camps, and millions of those people being killed by the Schutzstaffle–otherwise known as the SS–from the Nazi party dictated by Adolf Hitler. Throughout his life and his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel shows how someone's humanity can be taken away through the way they are treated. They can be stripped of their individuality, treated as if they are automatons, and ignored by those who are indifferent. In the memoir, Wiesel’s identity and individuality is taken away when he gets a number tattooed on his left arm that he is referred to instead of being

Him and everyone else living in the camps are being treated as lesser and their identities are taken away by the SS officers that run the camps. After catching Idek, one of the Kapos of the camp, with “a young Polish girl, half naked, on a straw mat,” Wiesel laughs and is seen by Idek who threatens him (57). Idek follows up on his word and Wiesel is called forward and given orders to “Lie down,” on a crate “On [his] belly,” and gets whipped (57). He goes on to write that “[He] obeyed,” that “[He] no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip,” and that “Only the first one really hurt,” (57). Wiesel has been treated as lesser to the point where even he believes that he is no longer a human being. Wiesel’s beliefs about his body being a cage is explained further when he writes that “[They] were no longer marching, [they] were

He feels like a machine made to listen to orders given to him by the Nazis, as if he is inhuman and incapable of feeling emotions. Even after his father dies and he is freed, he carries this belief that his body is not a part of him, but that it is a corpse. After being freed, Wiesel is sent to a hospital and he decides to look at himself in a mirror. Wiesel writes that “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating [him]” even though it is himself that he is seeing in the mirror (115). He doesn’t feel as though his body is a part of him, or that he is human. Indifference is an unforgivable act that causes someone to become inhuman. In 1999, Wiesel was invited to speak at the White House to speak about the past century. Within the speech, Wiesel claims that “to be indifferent to [suffering] is what makes the human being inhuman” (Wiesel, “The Perils of Indifference,” par. 1). 9). The syllable of the syllable. An instance of Wiesel’s indifference towards suffering in the memoir is when his father dies of