The Holocaust was a dreadful and truly awful time period, people were dehumanized, and shamed into losing their faith while they experienced tragic and awful death and pain. One Jewish survivor documents his experiences with death in his memoir, ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel. The novel is filled with his tales of death, dehumanization, and faith throughout the concentration camp, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the Jews lost their innocence that they once had. In the novel, Night, Elie, his father, and his fellow Jews lost their innocence through dehumanization, loss of faith, and experience of death and violence.
Throughout the tragic times of the Holocaust, in an attempt to excuse their actions, the Nazis dehumanized the Jews. This was a crucial factor in the Jews losing their innocence in Auschwitz. In Night the Nazis treated Elie, his father and his fellow Jews more as ‘things’ than people. The Jews were worked to death, and killed as if
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Elies experiences with death helped him lose his innocence, he even says that, after watching an innocent child die, “That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”. This stems from Elie’s loss of innocence, the symbolism of the soup ‘tasting of corpses’, along with the innocent child dying portrays that Elie is slowly losing his innocence, and soon it will die just as the child did. Elie’s fellow Jews also lost their innocence in this symbolic experience of death and violence. The train ride also quickly caused Elie’s fellow Jews to lose their innocence, after a “madwoman” spoke, saying “Look at the fire! Look at the flames everywhere! Fames everywhere...” (35). The Jews were quick to attack the woman who spoke of the flames, and “She received several blows to the head, blows that could have been lethal” from her fellow Jews. The Jews were quick to react with violence and this signifies the loss of innocence through violence and