Wake up From the Night Wake up From the Night Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and frequently appears in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, these acts of cruelty express and enhance the theme. One of the large themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes the mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis, the common people, and other Jews. Watching the large amounts of violence, abuse, and discrimination that occur in this memoir show us the horrors of the Holocaust and how it transformed the men and women who experienced it, as well as those who caused it. The first example of “man’s inhumanity to man” is the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews. Nazis, the followers of Adolf Hitler, built and …show more content…
These examples show the ignorance and lack of action by the people of Germany and surrounding countries, as well as the helplessness of the Jews during the Holocaust. While in the ghetto of Sighet, Elie witnesses the brutality the Hungarian police use to control the Jewish people. “The Hungarian police struck out with truncheons and rifle butts, to right and left, without reason… their blows falling upon old men and women….” (25) Finally, when riding the cattle car from Gleiwitz to Buchanan, citizens throw bread into the cars in order to watch the Jews fight for amusement. The quotes “They stopped and stared after us, but otherwise showed no surprise” (105) and “Dozens of starving men fought each other to death for a few crumbs. The German workmen took a lively interest in this spectacle” (105) display that the common public were cruel because they ignored Jewish persecution and even mocked it in a sense. They were bystanders. This relates to the theme because it shows how inaction can be worse than beating; because the people did not help the Jews, they forced them to endure the Holocaust. This is truly
World War II has no shortage of examples demonstrating man’s inhumanity to man: the atomic bombs, the Holocaust, the fire bombings, and the war itself all evidence the horrors that humans can visit upon other humans. Night, by Elie Wiesel, establishes certain examples of cruelty, like tossing infants into fire and using babies as target practice. Fire is the common theme in these examples, as much of the death resulting from the war and genocide is attributable to fire. Thus, inhumanity and fire are linked by the human capacity for violence. When the people of Sighat learn of the horrors Moishe the Beadle witnessed, they didn’t believe it; they couldn’t even imagine one human doing the things he described to another human being.
In an interview with Paul Bloom, a Canadian-American psychologist, he explained that it was actually easy for people to act cruelly. During the Holocaust, for example, the Nazi Germans were able to kill millions of Jews by dehumanizing them or, as Bloom explained, by thinking of them as Sub-Human. Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, provides a harrowing description of his experiences as a young boy during the Holocaust. Wiesel conveys a powerful message about the innate cruelty of humans by vividly describing the crimes committed and the inhumanity he witnessed. In this essay, I will explore Wiesel’s portrayal of human cruelty and argue that humans are inherently cruel, rather than kind, through the actions of Rabbi Eliahu’s son, the prisoners on the
The minorities of society fell victim to dehumanization at the cruel hands of SS guards and the inhumane camp where they were held captive for what seemed to be endless periods of time also like the life in China. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel the SS guards were torturing 2 many innocent people for no apparent reason. In China the kids are forced to work at a young age with no choice; kids held in concentration camps are forced to work in brutal conditions. Chinese people had to go through almost the same things that the people in the Holocaust had to go through. There was a lot of pain and times that people didn’t want to be alive anymore.
“From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me,” Wiesel 109. This quote relates to the thesis by proving if something traumatic happens it's very emotionally draining as well as physically draining. The novel Night, by Elie Wiesel tells us how inhumanity affects people by being forever traumatized and losing their own humanity. Eternal traumatization is caused by inhumanity. For instance,”The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine has never left me,” Wiesel 109.
Night, an autobiography that was written by Elie Wiesel, is from his perspective as a prisoner. The book focuses on Wiesel and his father experiencing the torture that the Nazis put them through, and the unspeakable events that Wiesel witnessed. The author, Wiesel, was one of the handfuls of survivors to be able to tell his time about the appalling incidents that occurred during the Holocaust. That being the case, in the memoir Night, Wiesel uses somber descriptive diction, along with vivid syntax to portray the dehumanizing actions of the Nazis and to invoke empathy to the reader.
Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place as the tyrant Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Nazis targeted the Jews' humanity, and slowly dissolved their feeling of being human. The feeling of dehumanization was very common between the jews. They were constantly being treated as in they were animals. The author and narrator Elie Wiesel, personally experienced being treated like an animal
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.
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
From the small town of Sighet in Transylvania to the huge concentration camps of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, the author and victim of the book Night, the horrifying experience of the Holocaust. Wiesel is a 15 year old Jewish boy who was captured by the Germans or “Nazis” during WWII. He went through an overwhelming amount of trauma, like when he got separated from his mother and sisters and watching his father suffer an unbearable amount of pain that eventually killed him. The fact is, power is a tool that can corrupt itself and others, it can ruin people’s lives and it can do that without people even realizing it.
Dehumanization Causing Events in Night Over the course of Eliezer’s holocaust experience in the novel Night, the Jews are gradually reduced to little more that “things” which were a nuisance to Nazis. This process was called dehumanization. Three examples of events that occurred which contributed to the dehumanization of Eliezer, his father, and his fellow Jews are: people were divided both mentally and physically, those who could not work or who showed weakness were killed, and public executions were held.
The best way to summarize the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, is to use the word “humanity” because of the way that Ellie struggles to preserve his own humanity as he experiences death camp, Auschwitz. Humanity is best defined as “the quality of being humane; kindness; benevolence.” Throughout Night, Elie display’s and contrasts how humanity and inhumanity are both key elements at the camp. This is the most effective way to summarize Night, for a multitude of reasons. Elie’s choices to include stories about the young boy’s hanging, his own father’s death, and the young boy who runs away from his father, are great examples of why humanity is one of the key principles in the book.
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.
Inhumanity and Cruelty in Night 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.
Night has revealed to me the immensity of the suffering and ruthlessness that Jews were subjected to on daily basis during the holocaust in an emotional and moving first-hand experience. I choose a train, symbol of oppression, to represent the initial separation from a normal life in which everyone inside the crowded train car received, along with a taste of the pain and suffering that was soon to be forced upon them. I choose this quote to show how shocking mentally and physically the transition phase was from a normal life to that of the oppressed and to emphasize how easily he gave up in the beginning. Despite this, he managed to persevere and overcome the enormous challenges of surviving in a concentration camp.
Life as a Jew during the Holocaust can be very harsh and hostile, especially in the early 1940’s, which was in the time of the Holocaust. “Sometimes we can only just wait and see, wait for all the things that are bad to just...fade out.” (Pg.89) It supports my thesis because it explains how much the Jewish community as