How Does Elie Wiesel Show Courage

In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, courage is demonstrated throughout the novel by various characters. To begin, courage was shown when Elie’s father was too weak to continue working and was selected to be killed, so Elie ran after his father, determined not to lose him. Courageously he chased after his father, “...Several SS men rushed to find me, creating such a confusion that a number of people were able to switch over to the right-among them my father and I. Still, there were gunshots and some dead” (Wiesel 96). This piece of evidence shows that Elie rebelled against the SS to be with his father, which takes tremendous courage. Furthermore, in the earlier chapters of Wiesel’s novel he was beaten by a Kapo named Idek because he was in a bad mood. A French woman showed courage by giving Elie a mini speech in perfect German, a language no one knew she spoke, in order to pass off as an Aryan. Years later they meet

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. The German officer shouted, “There are eighty of you in the car, if anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs” (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans thought nothing of them. Instead the Germans compared the Jews to being like “dogs”, which showed that the Germans thought Jews were not worthy of being treated like a human. In conclusion, in World War II, the Jews were dehumanized because of their beliefs, they were treated as unworthy objects that are a burden to