Loss Of Self And Personal Identity In Elie Wiesel's Night

1001 Words5 Pages

Jewish people were excluded from public life on September 15th, 1935 when the Nuremberg Laws were issued. These laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and their right to marry Germans. When the Nuremberg Laws were established, the Jewish population began the process of losing their identity and eventually themselves. As soon as Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, the human race would be forever scarred. Although it is estimated the number of people killed in the Holocaust was around 11 million, there is a high chance of the death toll being much higher. The sheer amount of lives lost in this horrid time astonishes a large quantity of today’s population. Not only were people being tossed into the concentration camps, but soldiers and civilians were killed in the fight for their lives’. Human beings were given numbers and made to look like clones, as if to hide the misery of dehumanization. Loss of self and personal identity is shown throughout Night by Elie Wiesel. When hearing …show more content…

Many actions played out during the Holocaust and World War II were not humane, and still remind us like a scream behind closed doors: hidden but still heard. While hearing the horrid stories and seeing the ghoulish photos of times not to be forgotten, we see the tragedy that is the mistreatment of human lives. Our identities are lost little by little, but those victims had theirs ripped from their bodies. After losing everything and then becoming a nearly empty vessel, it is amazing that we attempt to comprehend the cruelty of the Holocaust. The loss of identity and self might have started with Adolf Hitler’s reign, for the Holocaust legacies, but we are all losing bits of ourselves constantly. Although we lose ourselves, we find bits of others that become us. So are we not always losing our identities? When the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, Jews in Europe were only beginning the fight for their