What Is Dehumanization In Night

Dehumanization is the process in which a person is deprived of their human qualities. The Nazis often used this practice on the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust as these people were stripped of their humanity, and many examples of this can be found in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even with these crematories…”(Wiesel 15). This quote showcases the absence of humanity in concentration camps. The Nazis valued the lives of the Jews so little that they threw the Jews into fires and gas chambers without any regard that those were human lives. The prisoners were denied of their basic human right, life. They were no longer humans, but instead they were corpses. While some Jews’ lives were immediately taken by the Nazis at the entrance to the camps, the ones who stayed alive were who suffered

“He leapt on me like a wild animal, hitting me in the chest, his blows growing more and more violent, until I was covered with blood”(Wiesel 60). This was just one of the times in Night where physical violence was used to take the life out of the Jews. They were constantly beaten, most of the time over insignificant reasons, because the Nazis did not want them to fight back. After this particular instance where Elie was beaten by Idek, Elie became significantly quieter in his protests against the Nazi officers. He would not go out of his way to help his fellow prisoners anymore. Even while watching his father get battered Elie thought to himself, “I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. This is what concentration camp life had made of me”(Wiesel 63). The Nazis physically beat the lives out of the Jews. Over time, Elie and the other prisoner’s presences became lesser and lesser because they did not have any strength left inside