The Survivor By Elie Wiesel Sparknotes

The Excruciating Scourge of The Jews Art Spiegelman, in the Graphic Novel Maus, and Tadeusz Różewicz, in the poem The Survivor, together introduce the impairment of the Jewish people, showing how they were brutally murdered, and treated like animals. The Jewish people were blamed for everything wrong that happened in Germany, according to Adolf Hitler. Leading the Third Reich, he explained to all of Germany of what the Jews had done, claiming that they had caused the Great Depression. They used the Jewish people as a scape goat to all their problems, and that is what led to such disastrous consequences. The book Maus, and the poem The Survivor show what had happened to the Jewish people, explaining the dehumanization and animalization of

They were always stripped of their rights as humans, one by one, little by little, until they were worse than animals themselves. The Germans would treat everyone that was a prisoner in the camps poorly, however, the Jews were treated the worst. While Vladek was in the camps as a prisoner of war, he was forced to starve and live in tents, as Vladek says, “Brrr. The Polish get heated cabins.” And someone else responds with, “Yes, and we’re just left to freeze in these tents” (55). The Jewish prisoners of war were not considered the same as the Polish, even though they were fighting against the Germans. They gave proper living conditions to normal prisoners of war but showed their real authority towards the Jews. Time and again, the Germans would show that the Jews were worse than anything else in the world and deemed them lower whenever possible. Furthermore, the Germans didn’t only animalize the Jews in the camps, but also unknowingly achieved this while the Jews would hide for their lives. While Vladek was in a town looking for his cousin Miloch, he learned that Miloch was living “Inside this garbage hole [that] was separated by a tiny space – maybe only 5 feet by 6 feet” (155). He lived in this garbage dump with his wife and three-year-old child in someone’s backyard, trying to survive in the cold. They were living in conditions that compared to animals, were definitely worse, and shows to what extent the hand of the Germans went. The Jews were degraded terribly, and forced to live in such dire conditions, which show the effects of dehumanization. Since people had to live in such dreadful circumstances, they would do anything to increase their chances of survival, which could go as far as to betraying your own