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Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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Stripped of Humanity Have you ever imagined losing everything that makes you who you are? That's what happened to Elie, and his family as well as all Jew that lived during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel memoir called “Night” take us into his life as a young Jewish boy during that time. He describes the horrors that he and his fellow Jews had to go through during the Holocaust as well as the deaths of his family. He describes the harsh and inhumane living conditions that prisoners were forced to endure in concentration camps. In addition to the physical suffering that they had to endure in concentration camps. During the Holocaust, the Jewish people were subjected to dehumanization through various ways such as forced labor, starvation, and cruel …show more content…

They had to carry heavy stones onto freight cars or else they would had to face beatings and death, as Wiesel states, "We loaded the heavy stones onto the freight cars" (73). Armed guards watched over the prisoners and threatened them with machine guns, as Wiesel describes, "Every few yards, there stood an SS man, his machine gun trained on us" (29). Jewish prisoners had no choice but to go on with these orders, or they would be killed. The constant fear of being killed and the requirement to work under dangerous and dehumanizing conditions highlight the extreme inhuman treatment of the Nazi regime towards the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The Jewish people in the Holocaust not only were force to work, but they also didn't get enough food. Sometimes they only received a piece of bread or nothing at all. As Wiesel describes, "We were given bread, the usual ration. We threw ourselves on it. Someone had the idea of quenching his thirst by eating snow. Soon, we were all imitating him" (96). This shows how dehumanizing it was to have to survive on just bread and snow. The prisoners were reduced to behaving like animals in their desperate search for food. This made the already terrible conditions of the concentration camps even

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