Elie Wiesel faced a lot of cruelty and a lot of inhumanity from man throughout his time in the concentration camps from other prisoners and the Nazis. In the memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, cruelty and the theme of man’s inhumanity to man appears throughout the whole story and throughout Elie 's time within the concentration camps, in that it gives us examples of how the Nazis didn’t feed them enough, beat them, stripped them of their identities, made them run long distances, and how the Jew’s would be cruel to each other when they would take food from one another and beat others. One of the first examples of cruelty is from the Nazis towards Elie. The author wrote “Then I was aware of nothing but the strokes of the whip. One...Two…, he counted.” (Weisel 65), which shows us how the Nazi’s would beat the Jewish people within the concentration camps.
Although it seemed nearly impossible for many Jews to resist the Nazis due to the limited access to weapons, it would be a grave mistake to believe that all Jews went to their death like sheep to slaughter. The term resistance, when related to the Jews and the Holocaust meant not only the active resistance against the Nazis, but also the cultural and spiritual resistance that the Jews had. There were many Jews that rebelled and resisted against the SS officers of the camp, but some Jews could only commit acts of cultural and spiritual resistance to oppose Nazi tyranny. The Active/Armed Resistance, Cultural and Spiritual Resistance, and Partisans allowed the Jews to practice a form of resistance and inspired Jewish hope. Without these significant factors, it would be impossible for the Jews to oppose the Nazis, accelerating the mass murder and genocide.
In Germany, during the 1940’s, most people stood by as these events happened. Their behaviour is not unique to Germany and has been repeated throughout history. As the bystanders displacement of human weakness contributes to the genocide itself. More recently this type of behaviour was demonstrated in Rwanda. The film Hotel Rwanda articulates the significant impact that speaking truth to authority can have.
If any of the workers are not capable of performing tasks due to sickness or disease, they are most likely to get killed. The Nazis often refer to Jews as goods for nothing, and treat them like they are animals. Separating young children from their mother is emotionally dehumanizing the Jews. The Nazis dehumanize Jews physically by beating them up for nothing. When Eliezer crosses Idek’s path at work one day, he says, “I happened
In these concentration camps, the Jews were given inhumane, brutal actions. Not only were the Jews who were not fit to work thrown into the gas chambers or shot, those that were kept alive were worked without any regards to their comfort or rights. Essentially, the Jews weren 't treated as humans due to their faith. This creates a problem in the Jew’s concept of God, a being supposedly all good and all powerful. Such a being could not have ignored the Jews when they were being persecuted due to their belief in Him.
November 9-10, 1938 was known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. Anti- Semitic Germans carried out this vicious attack targeting innocent people of Jewish faith. During this event, over 1000 synagogues were scorched and over 7500 Jewish run businesses were looted. The Jews were victims of the horrendous practice of scapegoating. As defined by dictionary.com, scapegoatism is “the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself.” The German extremists blamed the Jews for the problems in their country such as hyperinflation caused by the German government printing an excess of money, not by Jewish bankers.
The Holocaust was a time in which millions of people were persecuted and mistreated: people banned together and stood up against prejudice and discrimination by actively and passively opposing the Germans. Citizens that actively resisted used violence and force to directly attacked the Nazis in attempt to save their life. Those that prefered, prepared to resist passively by not using physical brutality, but instead continued their daily lives out of the sight of the Nazis. In “The Diary of Anne Frank,” we see how Meip, a Dutch Citizen resisted the Germans passively, by hiding the Frank family and four other Jewish families in a secret annex above Anne’s father 's business premise during World War Two. They resisted without risking anybody’s life, yet still maintained their Jewish culture and beliefs.
The hateful banter of the S.S finally got into Wiesel’s mind- he now knew how the Nazis truly viewed the Jews. The reason they were allowed to treat them like this: because the Jews were at the bottom of the chain, and those who hated them at the top. The had no power, so they had no freedom. They ended up being banned from restaurants and other public places. Their eventual sentence in the concentration camps and their mistreatment their truly showed how the chain had made them into
The Nazis “forbid the Jehovah’s Witnesses to meet together to study God's word and worship him” (Document 1). This was not a huge deal Hitler was just trying to separate them, however, these punishments continued to get worse. Nazis would hunt down Jehovah’s Witnesses and put them into concentration camps. In the concentration camps, they were tortured and killed. Along with this the conditions were terrible and they were not properly fed and cleaned, and they were forced to do hard jobs and labor.
They are good at hunting and they are enemy of mice. At the time of WWII, Hitler- the leader of German hates Jews very much. He brainwashes to Germans that Jews are the thieves, they steal their land, jobs, but they persist to have their own culture. That is because they believe one day they will back to their hometown. For Germans, Jews just like pests and their enemy-mice.