Over 6 million people, mainly Jews, perished and died in camps during the Holocaust. Among these people was Elie Wiesel. Elie was a young teenage boy when he experienced the Holocaust, and he survived to tell the story. In his memoir Night, Wiesel describes his experiences and how they changed him forever. He sees things no one should, like the burning of people in the crematoriums. He is tortured and starved endlessly. Ultimately, Wiesel’s memoir teaches us that dehumanization has the power to destroy one's identity, using the motifs of faith and relationships. Humans were stripped of everything throughout the Holocaust, and the dehumanization they encountered caused them to lose sight of their faith. On the first night in camp, Elie witnesses a mass murder of …show more content…
Wiesel concludes the finality of his belief in God, and he describes “But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing.Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is He? This is where—hanging here from these gallows.’”(Wiesel 65). The pipel being hung represents the dying of innocence in God’s presence. The faith of the Jews disappears in the camps and they see an innocent child die in front of their eyes. The metaphor comparing the gallows represents the dying faith of the Jews because they describe that God is hanging there, which portrays that he dies in front of their eyes as a symbol of their faith. The power of these experiences changes one’s morals and beliefs, portraying the true power of dehumanization. The dehumanization of the Jews in the Holocaust is also presented through the destruction of relationships with one’s self and with others. In the concentration camps, the Jews experience multiple forms of torture, including starvation. They ultimately have no purpose in life. They begin to lose value in themselves, to the extreme that, “The bread, the soup—those were my entire