The Holocaust took place from 1933-1945 led by Germans, more specifically Hitler. The memoir Night by Elie Weisel was written to tell people about the horrors of the Holocaust from his point of view. Weisel and all Jews from his town, Sighet, were removed and first sent to a ghetto then to multiple concentration camps in 1944. At first they believed this was a good thing, but came to find out it would be a terrible life altering experience. In chapters 1-3 of the book Night, the Jews were dehumanized in an immense amount of ways. The journey even to get to the camp was harsh and made the Jews feel more like cattle than humans. At their first stop a German officer said “There are eighty of you in this car.” A simple cattle car held eighty people, with no room to sit down, little air, and consequences to sounds of suffering. First of all they were left in there for over three days standing almost the whole time, like animals and not people on the road. With minimal stops, the waste piled up as well and they were living with that smell in the corner. As for the …show more content…
These people, these children never did anything wrong, but they never did anything extraordinary either. They just had no skills to offer so the Germans did not think that they needed to live life, a decent human life. It is just that the Jews were not seen as humans so ending their lives was an easy task. At one point the book even mentions children being dumped from train cars into the flames, almost like a bad supply of food or some product. These prisoners were killed in a ravage way in front of so many other people, and a human should never have to go through that which is one way dehumanization was
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel was written in 1955, 10 years after he went through the Holocaust. The holocaust was when Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jewish race by putting them in concentration camps. The Jews are dehumanized through chapter 1-3.Hitler described them by the Jewish problem. Hitler was the one started the Holocaust.
The carts that the Jewish people were forced to ride on was only the beginning of what they went through. They had no room to even sit down; they
They were also constantly tortured and experimented on randomly. They were constantly dehumanized and treated more as cattle. In the book, Ellie Weisel discussed how the Jews lost their identity, which was the only thing making them human. Being called a mix of words and numbers takes a toll on your mental health, mainly to the Jews. During the time of the holocaust there weren't many doctors that knew about PTSD, so many Jews that survived, went undiagnosed.
The Jews are dehumanized throughout chapters 1-3 of “Night”. One way the Jews were dehumanized was that they had no choice or opinion about anything. The Jews had two choices, they either had to work or they went to the crematorium. On page 39 in chapter 3, the Angel of Death said,”Work or crematorium-the choice is yours.” The
“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…” -Elie Wiesel ( https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/holocaust ) book that describes the Holocaust very well, through the eyes of the author Elie Wiesel, is Night. The Holocaust was an event in history that impacted millions of lives and souls. Through the book Night there were cases that demonstrated dehumanization towards the Jewish people, the selection, comparison to animals and other creatures, and starvation. At the arrival to the concentration camp, a selection was taken place and the Jewish people went a certain way based on gender, age, ability to do certain things, and health.
Dehumanization is a theme that was heavily explored throughout the progression of Night, and especially through Elies experiences at different concentration camps.. The first instance of horrible cruelty shown at the camps starts as early as his arrival at Birkenau, where Elie and his family first arrive after leaving Sighet. Within Elie’s first day at the camp, he already began to see the horrors of the concentration camps. As soon as he arrives, he is stripped away from his family and is forced into wooden barracks, where he is beaten by the kapos and forced to run in the blistering cold without any clothing. After this, they are all forced back into the barracks, where they are given some clothes which don’t fit most of them.
From 1941-1945 over 6 million Jews had died at the hands of the Nazis and Adolf Hitler during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel was one of few who survived these horrors. He wrote about his experiences in his book Night. In this scene from Night by Elie Wiesel, he and dozens of others have been stuffed into cattle cars on trains, and people are throwing bread into the cars to watch the people in the cars fight for it. Wiesel explores dehumanization to demonstrate how changed people become because of the horrors that they had seen and experienced.
In “Night” by Elie Wiesel, Elie writes about numerous examples of the atrocities and acts of dehumanization committed during the holocaust and also writes about some redeeming moments that helped him to keep pushing and survive. When the story first starts out, Elie and the rest of the jews in sighet are living their everyday lives until one day the Germans come to town. Over the next few weeks, the Germans slowly but surely took control of sighet and began enforcing very strict laws. Then, everyone is shipped off to concentration camps by train, and somehow Elie and his father stick together through several concentration camps and numerous atrocities but eventually Elie's father dies. During this whole story, Elie is called “filthy dog”, he
Johnson Chen Mrs Way English 09 14 March 2023 The brutal dehumanization tactics in Night In the short but deep and meaningful novel Night, by Elie Wiesel. Shows the story about the conflict between the Jews vs the Nazi’s dehumanization tactics. The story takes place during WW2, with the two main characters fighting for survival in a concentration camp.
Jewish people were being put through many extreme things, they were being overworked, staved, and killed every second of the day. In the novel it states, “How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burnt but the world kept silent” (Wiesel, Night 32). The whole world was conscious about the Holocaust and everything that was happening to the innocent Jewish people. They were constantly living in agony but the world did not care. They chose to be indifferent because it did not affect them directly.
“Article 5. No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” (United Nations). The purpose of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” is to create equality and enforce humanity with justice, peace, and hope. Article 5 of this declaration is violated throughout Elie Wiesel's entire experience in Auschwitz as he is brutally abused and exposed to cruel happenings throughout his stay. The holocaust was the state sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewish people by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933-1945.
(Night 100). While the prisoners were tired and famished, a German passer-by took pleasure in seeing them fight for food like animals. Germans viewed Jewish people like “human trash” that didn’t matter anymore because of their beliefs. Everyone was guilty of diverting and making this not their battle to fight for. Their pain was real but was looked upon as made-up and not genuine that lasted for 12
Jews that lived during the Holocaust were robbed and deprived of their God given rights and humanity.. They slowly lost hope, faith, family, and the reason you keep living. Elie Wiesel realizes he has to let go of his family to survive when the doctor says, “In this place there is no such thing as father, brother, friend”(110). This is dehumanizing because people are born needing a family to depend on and once they lose something as simple as that, they fall into a pit of negative emotions. Thousands of people lost their family members during the holocaust and the Germans had absolutely so sympathy towards them.
The Jewish people were not just deprived of their identities or their belongings, but of all their human rights. The Jews during this time were treated like nothing, they were treated like the dirt that the Nazis had stomped their boots through and spat on. This was not only a time of fear and death, but this was a time for war.
In 1933 the Nazi party of Germany came to power to rebuild the world. They envisioned a perfect race of blond hair, blue-eyed Germans ruling the world, ridding it of all who were different. They were especially brutal to the Jews of Europe, murdering over six million Jews between 1933 and 1945. But before the Nazis gave them the mercy of death they made them worn, tired, and less than human. Dehumanization is stripping people or a group of positive human qualities.