Stripped of Humanity Have you ever imagined losing everything that makes you who you are? That's what happened to Elie, and his family as well as all Jew that lived during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel memoir called “Night” take us into his life as a young Jewish boy during that time. He describes the horrors that he and his fellow Jews had to go through during the Holocaust as well as the deaths of his family. He describes the harsh and inhumane living conditions that prisoners were forced to endure in concentration camps. In addition to the physical suffering that they had to endure in concentration camps. During the Holocaust, the Jewish people were subjected to dehumanization through various ways such as forced labor, starvation, and cruel …show more content…
They had to carry heavy stones onto freight cars or else they would had to face beatings and death, as Wiesel states, "We loaded the heavy stones onto the freight cars" (73). Armed guards watched over the prisoners and threatened them with machine guns, as Wiesel describes, "Every few yards, there stood an SS man, his machine gun trained on us" (29). Jewish prisoners had no choice but to go on with these orders, or they would be killed. The constant fear of being killed and the requirement to work under dangerous and dehumanizing conditions highlight the extreme inhuman treatment of the Nazi regime towards the Jewish people during the Holocaust. The Jewish people in the Holocaust not only were force to work, but they also didn't get enough food. Sometimes they only received a piece of bread or nothing at all. As Wiesel describes, "We were given bread, the usual ration. We threw ourselves on it. Someone had the idea of quenching his thirst by eating snow. Soon, we were all imitating him" (96). This shows how dehumanizing it was to have to survive on just bread and snow. The prisoners were reduced to behaving like animals in their desperate search for food. This made the already terrible conditions of the concentration camps even
Daily Life in The Concentration Camps “… the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jews.” – Adolf Hitler. It was a very sad time in Germany, it all started when Adolf Hitler got elected. His plan was to wipe out the Jews from all of existence, and he ended up killing 11 million people. The first part of his plan was to open up a few camps, and he ended up with 20,000 concentration camps, some of the main camps are Aushwits-Burkina, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Theresienstat, and Buchenwald.
Dehumanization during the Holocaust According to a 2022 article published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nazi racism resulted in the persecution and mass murder of six million Jews and millions of other people.” Before World War II, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany where he sparked Nazism and started the Holocaust. The Holocaust was an attempt to rid the world of Jews, since Hitler was convinced they were an inferior and parasitic race. Not only were Jews killed by the Nazis, but they were also dehumanized. This dehumanization was done through things such as separating families, taking away belongings, inflicting poor hygiene and starvation, treatment like animals, and gas chambers.
I don’t think that it was very fair that they wanted them to do all of this work and only eat bread and soup. Even though he wanted them to suffer while doing it I still think that was a little harsh. In the camps there is a job to where you have to load dead bodies into a fire pit which is pretty gross but it’s part of their torture and the people in charge of the camps didn’t care one bit about being cruel. According to the article” Soup, stale bread, black coffee” were all they were allowed to eat. There is one more way they were dehumanized, let me show you.
The book Night By Elie Wiesel , Elie Wiesel tells the story of how he was sent to a concentration camp called Auschwitz, he struggles to keep his faith throughout all the terrible violent things that have happened to him. He also witnessed his fellow prisoners lose their faith and humanity throughout this awful experience. Elie Wiesel was sent to the concentration camps with his father, mother, and three sisters; most of his family died except his two older sisters that he soon met up with later in his life. Elie and his father went through so many terrible acts that the SS men did to them while in the concentration camps. During his time in the camp Elie and his fellow prisoners were constantly dehumanized and they were made to feel like they had no place in the world.
The memoir, Night, written by author and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, details his harrowing experiences during World War II. At this time, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, took control of Germany and its surrounding areas, eventually establishing concentration camps to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution: the systematic murder of European Jews and any other minority deemed unfit for life in Nazi Germany. Elie Wiesel, originally taken to Auschwitz, managed to survive the horrors, and dedicated the rest of his life to sensitizing the world to the atrocities he, and so many others, experienced. Specifically in Night, Wiesel depicts the efforts the Nazis made to dehumanize the Jews, and how these efforts affected the victims. Dehumanizing events such the loss of his home in Sighet, the arrival in Auschwitz, and
Elie Wiesel was just a young boy when he experienced the brutality, torture, and control in concentration camps during the Holocaust. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, he tells of how SS officers working for Hitler used fear to control the prisoners in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. In the concentration camps, the Nazis violence made the prisoners fearful so that they could control them. Elie Wiesel and the other prisoners have been extremely dehumanized by the brutal conditions they go through during the Holocaust. Elie is being called out for seeing the Kapo, Idek, having an affair with a Polish girl, and he was punished.
Imagine being stripped of everything in life-one’s home, family, friends, and wealth-and being forced into a labor. The prisoner toils for what seems like months-years even, but it is all futile in the end. This is what the Jews imprisoned in the Holocaust felt. The Holocaust was the organized and systemic killing of Jews by the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945. Millions of Jews were taken from their homes and forced into concentration camps, where they were forced to work and later murdered in cold blood.
This behavior in the Jewish community where modesty and decorum were valued would normally have been viewed as outrageous and cause for chastising at least. Taken out of their normal environment and subjected to being treated like less than humans, this is evidence that the Jews were beginning to behave to be congruent with how they were treated. Another example from Night that demonstrates this treatment is seen upon the arrival of Eliezer and the others to the Auschwitz check in station. The German officer tells them that if they attempt to escape, “you will all be shot like dogs” (Wiesel 24). Later in the narrative, Eliezer describes how some prisoners who could not keep up on a march were shot like lame animals.
Jewish citizens had to experience this every day, and a variety of other inhumane events both in the Ghettos and in the concentration camps, which led to most Jews suffering from horrendous
My father swallowed my ration.”. In the camps prisoners were only given one meal a day, to last them all day. For the work the Jews had to endure, one meal a day of no good food, was not healthy for them at all. Thats why when the camps were liberated By Allied forces, none of the Jews wanted to get revange on the Nazi Regime. The Prisoners only wanted food, The text states, “ Our first act as Free Men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions.
They had to overcome obstacles just to get enough food to stay alive. Nothing is harder than persevering alone, then trying to stay strong when there is nobody there. The people in the holocaust had to be ripped away from their families and dragged away to concentration camps. They had to endure suffering
There are so many first hand accounts of all of these things Jews went through in the holocaust. So many terrible things were happening to Jews and to any people that Hitler and the Nazis did not like. Survival was very hard for the Jews. Sometimes though, it was
The Holocaust was one of the worst examples of genocide that has occurred in the world and throughout history. Millions of people died during the Holocaust, including Jews and gypsies as well as homosexuals and those with mental illnesses. When people think of or remember the Holocaust, they typically relate it to concentration camps. The camps were used to house and execute prisoners and also perform hard manual labor. Every aspect of daily life in the camps was horrific as the conditions were brutal, both mentally and physically.
Weisell explains what life was like in a concentration camp; “ Hunger- thirst- fear- transport- selection- fire- chimney: these words all have intrinsic meaning, but in those times they meant something else (Weisellix).” The Jews were treated not as humans because they were not viewed as such in the eyes of the Nazi’s.
The more we walked, the more I heard shooting” (Spiegelman 82). This quote displays the theme because it is extremely inhumane to murder someone for being so malnourished and physically incapable, that they can’t walk a long distance. Especially if you're the reason that they are so weak and malnourished, which is the exact situation the Nazis were in, they were responsible for the condition of the prisoners. This next quote will talk about how strict they were at the camp. During Vladek’s time at Auschwitz, they would have roll calls to gather the prisoners together.