How Is Night Dehumanized

Hardly Human

About 200,000 people that passed through the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust managed to survive. However, that number pales in comparison to the 2.1 to 4 million people slaughtered in that very same camp. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, became one of the seemingly lucky survivors of this horrifying genocide. In this novel, Elie describes the agony he went through while going from one concentration camp to the next attempting to escape death. During the Holocaust, the Nazi’s treated their prisoners as vermin that they needed to immediately dispose of. Within the concentration camps, they put the strong willed to use before the prisoners met their predetermined fate. Elie, along with the rest of the prisoners, acquired numbers tattooed on their forearms upon arrival to compliment

From then on the Nazi’s treated their prisoners like objects rather than people. They dehumanized and desensitized them, thinking of them as machines that could only complete simple tasks and required a small bowl of broth with a single slice of bread to function. The Nazi’s took the victims of the Holocaust and stripped them of their identities, violated them beyond their breaking point, and wiped them clean of all emotion.

First of all, the SS dehumanized the prisoners of the concentration camps by stripping them of their identities. The Nazi’s infringed upon people’s everyday lives and deprived them of their originality. Innocent people like Elie turned into objects and suddenly, upon arrival at the concentration camps, became no more than a number. Attempting to ameliorate the human race, Hitler diminishes the prisoners of