ipl-logo

Examples Of Oppression In Night By Elie Wiesel

982 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Rise of national socialism in germany

For years, our society has been driven to identify who is “like you”. Often times, this includes excluding and judging others because they are not similar to you. Every person is a complex bunch made up of objectives, feelings, and other characteristics that can be different than ours. It is easier to disregard a person as less human and less worthy than we are. The term othering is when one views or treats someone as different from oneself because the group or individual is mentally classifies as “not one of us”. Secondly, there comes oppression. Oppression is being a victim of cruel and unjust treatment, taking away someone's rights and power over their life. The oppressed is seen as an alien or the “enemy”. It is human tendency to hate …show more content…

Elie Wiesel, author of the best-selling book “Night”, shared his personal experience of the hardships he experienced during the holocaust. Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. Around 1933, Germany was experiencing an economic crisis. Hitler believed the Jews were the root cause of this problem. He also blamed the Jews wholeheartedly for the defeat of Germany in World War 1. Soon after Hitler came into power, Germans began to exclude Jews from public life. Jews were not allowed to use public transportation, excluded from public places, and most importantly, Jews were mandated to wear the yellow star of David. The star of David made it easier to target and classify Jews. Nazis (National Socialist German Workers Party) began sending Jews to ghettos.Wiesel and his family were sent to ghettos, where they were clueless of what Hitler’s plan was or why they were placed in ghettos, Soon after they were sent to “labour camps”, that in truth were extermination camps, work camps, or transit camp. An estimate of six million Jews were tortured and killed within the concentration camps. The holocaust is an example of institutional oppression. Institutional oppression is the idea that one group is better than another and has the right to control how the other gets embedded in the institutions of the society, the laws, the legal system and police practice, the educational system, hiring practices, public policy, etc. HItler believed Germans were the superiors and the Jew were the inferiors. He also created a variety of laws that segregated Jews and controlled how they were imbedded in the institutions of society. For example, Jewish doctors were not allowed to practice on any patients, unless they were Jewish, Jews could not vote, they could not own pets, swim in public pools, the citizenship of German Jews were abolished, etc. They were excluded from

Show More
Related
281 Words | 2 Pages

From the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to the huge concentration camps of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, the author and victim of the book Night, the horrifying experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel is a 15 year old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans or “Nazis” during WWII. He went through an overwhelming amount of trauma, like when he got separated from his mother and sisters and watching his father suffer an unbearable amount of pain that eventually killed him. The fact is, power is a tool that can corrupt itself and others, it can ruin people’s lives and it can do that without people even realizing it.

Read More
684 Words | 3 Pages

In this work, Night  by Elie Wiesel, the author expresses that restricting basic needs and one’s individuality, leads way to dehumanization, in which deconstructs a culture.  As Elie’s struggle slowly comes to an end, he analyzes his experience living in concentration camps and the loss of his character, which is emphasized toward the end of the memoir.  While beginning to adjust to the environment and the camp itself, Elie is approached by a hostile gentleman wanting to have his gold crown because of its value. This instance is shown when it says, “If you don't give me your crown, it will cost you much more!"(Wiesel 55). Due to the fact that the camps had given the prisoners, small rations of food, and stripped them of their valuable items, the crown's value had increased.

Read More
547 Words | 3 Pages

In his award winning book “Night” Elie Wiesel gives his first hand account of the terrors of the holocaust and Nazi Germany. He goes through to explain the injustices that happened to him and the rest of the jewish people living in europe at this time, telling of the horrid dehumanization of a whole race and others targeted by the Nazi regime. Many of the horrors perpetuated by this group are in direct violation of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. One instance of violation shows up when the prisoners are explaining how buna used to be to Elie.

Read More
1624 Words | 7 Pages

For those who are unsure, oppression is the mistreatment of a group for an extended interval of time. Since there are heaping amounts of oppression in both genocides, this topic will be broken up into two subtopics; the brutality and dictatorship in the prisons, and how oppression happened in other ways both preceding and during the genocides. As many know, the oppression in the prisons for the mass extinctions mentioned earlier were unbearable. In fact, according to Wiesel, the mistreatment in the prisons were so bad that having frozen bodies and holding rocks so cold that their hands could have gotten stuck was just the norm (Wiesel 78). In other words, conditions in the camps for the Jews were so bad that something like being so cold that hands got stuck on rocks was normal to them, when it seems to society that that would be one of the worst pains imaginable.

Read More
868 Words | 4 Pages

Imagine knowing your fate ahead of time. That single moment would be stuck in your head, replayed every second to prevent it. This would obstruct your feeling of morals, making you only focus on your own survival. Nothing would get in your way of trying to survive. During the Holocaust, many people were faced with this moment when they stepped in a concentration camp.

Read More
422 Words | 2 Pages

The trouble around diversity Johnson states within chapter one of his book that people differ from one another. The trouble is produced by a world organized in ways that encourage people to use difference to include or exclude, reward or punish, credit or discredit, elevate or oppress, value or devalue, leave alone or harass. Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they've done or failed to do"(Johnson, 21). Privilege can also refer to unearned advantages.

Read More
593 Words | 3 Pages

The Holocaust was a horrible time in the 1940s. Hitler the leader of the Nazi’s had an idea of just having the perfect people which was having blonde hair and blue eyes. Hitler's plan was to kill the people who didn’t have these appearances. Hitler would do this by creating concentration camps that would torture, kill people in many ways which for example burning, starving them to death. In the book Night a book Elie Wiesel a Holocaust survivor wrote, talks how Elie survived those terrible times.

Read More
606 Words | 3 Pages

The Holocaust is one of the most horrifying events of the twentieth-century. During the Holocaust, Jews, for their supposed racial inferiority, experienced wide-spread state-sponsored persecution and genocide by Germany’s Nazi Party (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). While Jews were the primary target, other groups targeted for their supposed racial inferiority included the Roma, the disabled, and some of the Slavic people. Groups persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioral grounds included Communists, Socialists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gay people. This persecution began with the creation of ghettos, transit camps, and forced labor camps, all meant to make the deportation of Jews later easier.

Read More
500 Words | 2 Pages

Discrimination When people think of discrimination, the Holocaust comes to mind, but there are many more examples and ways of discriminating against others. This issue has been going on for centuries, and it is still a problem in today’s world. Discrimination is the isolating of others because of race, intelligence, and/or religion.

Read More
370 Words | 2 Pages

Being held guarded during the Holocaust caused suffrage and deaths. During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”. People were also imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered. These people included Roma, those with mental or physical disabilities, and homosexuals. The Holocaust was

Read More
691 Words | 3 Pages

Introduction "Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my god and my soul". The holocaust was a mass murdering of jews, Catholics, poles, and Ect. Elie Wiesel was among the people who were in the holocaust. He was in a concentration camp called Auschwitz, a mass murdering site. This happened in the days of World War II from 1933-1945.

Read More
744 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
1300 Words | 6 Pages

In the span of a lifetime one often faces many adversities that stand within their path.  While some challenges will be overcome easily, others will take a lot more tenacity. When in the face of adversity it is key not to give up. One should always strive to persevere through their hardships, no matter how severe they seem to be. The author of the memoir “Night” Elie Wiesel, vividly describes his experiences in the concentration camp of Auschwitz.

Read More
176 Words | 1 Pages

During the time of 1933-1945 the Nazi’s implemented a series of dehumanizing actions towards the jewish. In the book “Night” by Eliezer Wiesel, Wiesel discusses his life before being deported to a concentration camp, his experience in concentrations camps, and how he was finally liberated. Through Wiesel, we are able to witness the way these unfortunate jewish people were stripped of their rights, experimented on and objectified. First of all, there were many laws that were being established that were specifically targeting the Jewish population as time was progressing in Nazi Germany. These laws made a huge impact and made it more difficult for the jewish community to live as “normal” human beings.

Read More
712 Words | 3 Pages

Inhumanity and Cruelty in Night Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, conducted a genocide known as the Holocaust during World War II that was intended to exterminate the Jewish population. The Holocaust was responsible for the death of about 6 million Jews. Night is a nonfiction novel written by Eliezer Wiesel about his experience during the Holocaust. Many events in the novel convey a theme of “man’s inhumanity to man”. The prisoners of the concentration camps are constantly tortured and neglected by the German officers who run the camps.

Read More

More about Examples Of Oppression In Night By Elie Wiesel

Related Topics

Open Document