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Research Paper On Night By Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel was just a young boy when he experienced the brutality, torture, and control in concentration camps during the Holocaust. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, he tells of how SS officers working for Hitler used fear to control the prisoners in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. In the concentration camps, the Nazis violence made the prisoners fearful so that they could control them.
Elie Wiesel and the other prisoners have been extremely dehumanized by the brutal conditions they go through during the Holocaust. Elie is being called out for seeing the Kapo, Idek, having an affair with a Polish girl, and he was punished. "I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip" (57). Elie was whipped 25 times until he was unconscious, and they threw ice-cold water on him. Elie’s body was so damaged that he had a hard time seeing and having general control over his body when asked to stand up after he was whipped. Idek is showing power over the prisoners. He is forcing the prisoners to watch so he can …show more content…

The SS soldiers went into a safer shelter, and the prisoners were left alone. Next to the kitchen, they can see two unguarded cauldrons of soup. Taking the opportunity, a man came closer to the cauldrons. "Fear was greater than hunger. Suddenly, we saw the door of Block 37 open slightly. A man appeared, crawling snakelike in the direction of the cauldrons....We jumped at the sound of the shot." (59-60). This demonstrates that the fear of being shot overshadows the hunger of most prisoners. None of the other prisoners are willing to risk their lives, even though there are no SS soldiers around. This proves that the control the SS soldiers have over the prisoners was so strong that they did not even need to be around them for them to be scared. The SS soldiers use violence to show the prisoners not to go against the rules and show everyone the

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