Persuasive Essay On Night By Elie Wiesel

Over the past few centuries, our world has stood by while thousands of people in different countries were murdered. We did not learn from our mistakes because history has repeated itself multiple times, allowing a leader with too much power to manipulate others into turning against a certain group of people. In the Armenian Genocide, Abdulhamid II was the leader who was given too much power and the Armenians were unfortunately the victims. They were targeted and killed because they were not wanted in the Ottoman Empire. In just 8 years, 1.5 million Armenians died (Whitehorn). This genocide was very similar to the Holocaust and the torture of the Jews, demonstrated in Night by Elie Wiesel. In 12 years, millions and millions of Jews were murdered

To start off, both the Armenians and the Jews were dehumanized and thought of as an inferior race. They were looked down upon and treated like animals. The people who were against the Jews and the Armenians did not care what happened to them. Most of the time they would either be worked to death or murdered. Albert Ward talked about how the Armenians were mistreated in his book, Critical World Issues: Genocide. They were persecuted for their beliefs, and at the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, younger males were placed in labor camps after they were checked for weapons. Here they were either worked to death or killed (Ward 46). The Ottoman Empire did not care what happened to the Armenians because they thought they were inferior to them. Similarly, during the Holocaust, the Germans treated the Jews like animals, and they forced the Jews to do whatever they wanted, or else they got killed. Elie Wiesel demonstrated this when he had described what it was like to be controlled by people whose mindset was to kill you. He especially described how the Jews were treated when they were forced to march from camp to camp.

These two groups of people were targeted and killed because it was believed that if they died, the world would be a better place. The Jews were forced to do greuling and demanding work that shortened the lives of many. Millions of Jews were murdered by machine guns they had built and then placed in the holes they had dug before. These holes that they dug were referred to as mass graves. (Wiesel 2). After all of the work the Jews did, they were killed by the weapons they created and they were buried in the graves they dug. Although the Armenians did not dig their own graves, The Turks decided that to solve their problem by attempting to murder all of the Armenians (Ward 46). Furthermore, when both the Jews and the Armenians marched from place to place, they barely had any food or supplies to live off of. They were given the bare minimum and they were not expected to live long. On some occasions, a worker would take some bread and throw the crumbs into a wagon full of starving Jews. Each time the Jews fought desperately over the bread, while the worker just sat back and watched (Wiesel 100). The workers who did this were mocking the Jews by showing them that they can eat whenever they wanted while the Jews starved. Similarly, many people died when the Armenians were gathered up and forced to march long distances from their