Inhumane Treatment In Night By Elie Wiesel

“We must do something, we can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse, we must revolt”. These are the words from many men surrounding Elie Wiesel as he entered Auschwitz, calling out for rebellious toward the Germans harsh conditions. Of course they had no idea what they were getting themselves into, many thought that there was nothing wrong until boarding the cattle train that would send them off to their final resting place. Life during the holocaust was torturous to say the least, so much so that some 6,000,000 lives were taken during this time in Jewish descent alone. People of the Jewish descent did not have it easy; they either were forced out of their homes into concentration camps, or they would hide out only to be found and killed of they remained in their settlements.

In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.

Paradox, parallelism, personification, repetition, rhetorical question, pathos. You may ask yourself: what importance do these words have? These words are rhetorical devices used to develop a claim. A person who used these important devices was Elie Wiesel. In his 1986 Nobel Peace Acceptance Speech, Elie Wiesel develops the claim that remaining silent on human sufferings makes us just as guilty as those who inflicted the suffering and remain guilty for not keeping the memory of those humans alive.

Adolf Hitler, the Nazi dictator of Germany, conducted a genocide known as the Holocaust during World War II that was intended to exterminate the Jewish population. The Holocaust was responsible for the death of about 6 million Jews. Night is a nonfiction novel written by Eliezer Wiesel about his experience during the Holocaust. Many events in the novel convey a theme of “man’s inhumanity to man”. The prisoners of the concentration camps are constantly tortured and neglected by the German officers who run the camps. The cruelty of the German officers at the concentration camps change Elie’s personality throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Elie is deeply religious and spends most of his time studying Judaism. However, by the end of the novel, Elie believes that God has been unjust to him and all the other Jews, and has lost most of his faith. The cruelty of the German officers also changed the other Jews as well. The events of the Holocaust forces the prisoners to fend for themselves, and not help others.

Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities, according to the dictionary. Throughout Night it shows a lot of dehumanization examples. It would take hours to name all of them. Some of the ways dehumanization was showed in Night was all of the abuse, having no identity except for a number, and the hunger they felt because they would only get one meal per day.

The Holocaust was entitled as the worst act of genocide in history. Emotionally the Nazi 's tortured the Jews for years in concentration camps deprived them of their named and identity. Although there are many themes represented in the holocaust art and literature, struggle to maintain faith is present in the passage from Elie Wiesel 's Night, Judith dazzios "A day in the life of the Warsaw ghetto "and Alexander Kimels "The action in the ghetto of rohatyn"

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was established to protect fundamental laws, liberty, and pursuit of contentment. Yet after it was imprinted into life, power lust and war craving societies still violates the document that holds the existence of every individual. A memoir Night written by Eliezer Wiesel proves this accusation by elucidating the Jew’s hardship at the concentration camps of 1944-1945. German’s violating, millions suffering, the novel defends that the superior race (Adolf Hitler’s supporters) corrupted articles two, four, and nine of the proclamation.

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night. He has a very specific message in his book that many of us can learn from. Elie Wiesel wrote Night to show that the silence and hesitation surrounding the Holocaust is was what allowed it to occur and continue for as long as it did,

“‘I have terrible news,’ he said at last. ‘Deportation.’ The ghetto was to be completely wiped out. We were to leave street by street the following day” (Wiesel 11). Throughout the vast novel, Night,by Elie Wiesel, the protagonist Elie had gone through agonizing experiences, for the duration of the gruesome and unspeakable genocide. He later wrote this book ten years following these tragic experiences. During these events Elie had his human rights taken away a countless amount of times.

Nakedness, beatings, dogs, tattooed numbers, fire, chimney, crematoria, loneliness, silence, death,... selection. These were all methods and statements made by the Germans in an effort to dehumanize the Jews. One of Elie Wiesel’s main focuses in the book Night is on dehumanization. Germans would put Jews in harsh situations to make them suffer, to the point of death.

Imagine knowing your fate ahead of time. That single moment would be stuck in your head, replayed every second to prevent it. This would obstruct your feeling of morals, making you only focus on your own survival. Nothing would get in your way of trying to survive. During the Holocaust, many people were faced with this moment when they stepped in a concentration camp. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, describes the horrors of focusing on your own survival. Certain acts provoke inhumane acts throughout the ordeal. A central theme in Night is, even though it’s difficult, people should value compassion over their own survival.

“ You don 't need religion to have morals. If you can 't determine right from wrong, then you lack empathy not religion.”- unknown.

The human condition is a very malleable idea that is constantly changing due to the current state of mankind. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the concept of the human condition is displayed in the worst sense of the concept, during the Holocaust of WWII. During this time, multiple groups of people, most notably European Jews, were persecuted against and sent to horrible hard labor and killing centers such as Auschwitz. In this memoir, Wiesel uses complex figurative language such as similes and metaphors to display the theme that a person’s state as a human, both at a physical and emotional level, can be altered to extreme lengths, and even taken away from them, under the most extreme conditions.

During the Holocaust, many human rights were violated. After so much time without basic human rights, those who were in concentration camps were ready to kill anyone who got in their way of food. People were deprived of food, water, and clothes. When people first arrived at concentration camps they were separated by men, children, and women. The men were forced to do labor while the women and children were burned. Many human rights were taken away during the Holocaust. As shown in the memoir “Night”, by Elie Wiesel, many human rights were taken and violated.

The Holocaust is the deadliest recognized genocide in human history. It lasted from January 30,1933 – May 8,1945 and would result in the l1 million deaths. The causes of the Holocaust begin at the end of World War One with what Germans referred to as “the stab in the back”. This was a myth that claimed the German Army did not loose World War One but was betrayed by the Jewish population who gave up land and supplies to the Allies. As this spread anti-Semitism or hate for Jewish people grew in Germany as people viewed the Jewish population as deceptive and traitorous. As the Nazi party rose to power with their psychopathic leader, Adolf Hitler, at the helm they made it very clear that Jewish people were a threat to the German future and must therefore be exterminated.