False Universality Night is a autobiography about a 15 year old, fictional version of the author, Elie Wiesel, enduring the Holocaust and surviving. The story illustrates how the Holocaust stripped humanity and innocence from Wiesel. The rights violated in the book Night includes freedom from discrimination(Article 2), exemption from torture and degrading treatment(Article 5), and right to rest and leisure(Article 24).
Eli Wiesel, the author of Night, demonstrates dehumanization by illustrating how the Nazis tortured the Jews. The foreign Jews of Sighet were being deported out of their homes. Moshe the Beatle tells Elie of his time in Galicia with great emotion. Elie shares what the Nazis did to the Jews, “Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns” (Wiesel 6). When the Nazis used innocent infants as shooting targets it showed significant dehumanization because as infants they haven’t experienced any aspect of life. When the Nazis took the infants lives at such young ages the infants are denied the chance for experiences of life. Additionally, the class of
In his award winning book “Night” Elie Wiesel gives his first hand account of the terrors of the holocaust and Nazi Germany. He goes through to explain the injustices that happened to him and the rest of the jewish people living in europe at this time, telling of the horrid dehumanization of a whole race and others targeted by the Nazi regime. Many of the horrors perpetuated by this group are in direct violation of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.
Themes in a story help to describe what the book is about. It does this in the book Night by helping describe what World War 2 was like for the Jews. It also helps to see what the people in the camps went through. My two themes from night are imprisonment and survival. The first one I will talk about is imprisonment, then i’ll talk about survival.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
Imagine believing so strongly in something and then being let down, or thinking that you were wrong even to believe. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie felt as though he had lost his religion and belief in God. We learned how strong his beliefs were when he says,“I believed profoundly. During the day I studied the Talmud, and at night I ran to the synagogue to weep of the destruction of the Temple,” (Wiesel, 14). But then he experiences the hardships of the Holocaust and it abruptly changed him. In the book Night, the main theme is religious belief, shown when Elie talks about the his strong religion and belief as a boy, his disconnection from religion, and the inhumane actions the Nazis caused.
This dehumanized the Jews they were being treated like animals. It made the Jews feel like animals, worthless, they were being discriminated. During the couple of years when Elie and other prisoners were in concentration camps they were being dehumanized. Elie and the other prisoners were being treated like animals, being referred as numbers, they were being killed like animals.
“ … 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.
Anything is possible, even with these crematories…”(Wiesel 15). This quote showcases the absence of humanity in concentration camps. The Nazis valued the lives of the Jews so little that they threw the Jews into fires and gas chambers without any regard that those were human lives. The prisoners were denied of their basic human right, life. They were no longer humans, but instead they were corpses.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, the chain of power in the concentration camps is like this: the S.S at the top, the Kapos are lower, and the rest (mainly Jews) are at the bottom. Adolf Hitler was at the top of German society, his word was law. He put the Jews at the very bottom of the chain of power, so they had no rights. The role of the chain of power also decides who is strong and who is weak, who is right, and who is wrong, who is free and who is a slave of the chain.
As several Jews jumped off the wagon an SS officer said, “Men to the left! Women to the right!” (Wiesel 29). In this instance, they treat the Jews as if they were not human, but a herd of animals, giving countless commands to separate them from their loving family. Elie and his father were forced against their own will to seperate from their own family, even if they did not want to.
In the book Night, we the readers witness the hardships and struggles in Elie’s life during the traumatic holocaust. The events that take place in this story are unbearable and are thought to be demented in modern times. In the beginning Elie is shown as a normal teenage Jewish boy, but the events are so drastic that we the readers forget how he was like in the beginning. Changes were made to Elie during the book, whether they were minor or major. The changes generated from himself, the journey, and other people. The holocaust makes physical and mental alterations to Elie’s life, and this tells the reader that the people who did this are effective and impacting, also it shows that Elie’s mind is controlled by what he was experiencing.
They were tortured and murdered even children. His book Night Elie Wiesel explore several themes of the Holocaust including dehumanization loss of Rights and lots of Hope. The Jews have lost their rights by having to give up their things to being told how to live their lives and even losing themselves. The Jews had to hand over all their valuables to the authorities.
Night Theme The theme of Elie Wiesel’s Night is that ignorance is the most powerful evil. The first example of ignorance in Night is when Elie’s father says, “The yellow star? So what? It’s not lethal . . .”
In Night, one is faced with silence and negligence from the world. While being unwillingly evacuated from his home, Eliezer’s friends and neighbours stayed inside and watched as their former companions marched to their impending death. As Eliezer noted, “from behind their windows, from behind their shutters, our fellow citizens watched as we passed.’ (Eliezer Wiesel, 19) The Hungarian civilians watched in silence too naive and confused to approach the German military and help the Jewish people. Throughout the memoir, Eliezer takes great observation of how ruthless and malicious the German military guards were. Eva Olson a holocaust survivor once said, “The reason why the Germans took so many pictures was because they were proud and wanted