Imagine watching your beloved hometown being captured by your worst enemy. All the things that you love, being stripped of you one by one. Forced to wear a gold star just because of your religion, and being beat up and mistreated by your fellow neighbors. Sadly, this was just the beginning. As time continued on ghettos where the Jews’ new home. As some thought that life was harsh in these environments, they were not prepared for what was coming. As the SS hauled people onto cattle cars, the officers kept the secret that their prisoners were being transported to their death. From there on, the Jews were treated like objects rather than people. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, we learn the harrowing truth of the Nazi’s actions to dehumanize
You see it at the zoo, you see it at shelters, you see wild animals in a cage, which thoroughly describes how the Jewish community was treated at the time of the treacherous period known as the Holocaust, which started in 1939. The Holocaust was a period when the Nazi party and Hitler put millions of Jewish people in concentration camps, where they would then die or work until death. However, they were treated with dehumanizing qualities, similar to how a wild animal would be treated. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the Schutzstaffel or the SS officers, treated Elie, the main character, and the Jewish prisoners in a dehumanizing way by taking their belongings away, giving them commands like wild dogs, and calling and tattooing them with
In the memoir Night written by Elie Wiesel, he and his family were taken from their home in Sighet, Transylvania. This memoir takes place in around 1941, a few years after the Holocaust began. The first event that led to all of this is when Moshie the Beadle and the foreign jews were taken to dig their own graves. Elie and his family were transported in cattle cars to a concentration camp, called Auschwitz-Birkenau. Once they got to Auschwitz they read the sign that's above the gate, the sign said “ARBEIT MACHT FREI.”
“I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…” -Elie Wiesel ( https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/holocaust ) book that describes the Holocaust very well, through the eyes of the author Elie Wiesel, is Night. The Holocaust was an event in history that impacted millions of lives and souls. Through the book Night there were cases that demonstrated dehumanization towards the Jewish people, the selection, comparison to animals and other creatures, and starvation. At the arrival to the concentration camp, a selection was taken place and the Jewish people went a certain way based on gender, age, ability to do certain things, and health.
“The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames... A dark flame had entered my soul and devoured it.”
Dehumanized “The bell. Already we must separate, go to bed. Everything was regulated by the bell. It gave me orders, and i obeyed them. I hated it”.
People’s actions can bring great consequences. These consequences could be close to nothing, or something horrific. An example of this is the Holocaust. This event is talked about more in depth by Elie Wiesel who wrote the book “Night.” In the story, Elie Wiesel talks about the dehumanization he experienced during the Holocaust.
“An infinitely long train, composed of cattle wagons, with no roofs. The SS pushed us in, a hundred to a carriage, we were so thin” (Wiesel 92). Thus, the Jews are put into cattle wagons where those animals are supposed to be put in, which reveals the SS treat the Jews as unfairly as subhuman. In general, those Jews treat others inhumanity because they are treated unfairly as subhuman so they thought they don’t need to act as humans
“The time has come… you must leave all this…”(Wiesel 16) They had to leave all their belongings behind believing one day they would be back, but in the reality of the holocaust it was most likely they would never be back. In a way when they left all their belongings behind , but they also left many of their stories, identities but biggest of all their soul. Of course being in the ghetto was a horrible experience but none of them imagined that only the worst was yet to come . After being in the Ghetto for a short period of time they had to be transported in the trains to the concentration camps.
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.
In many ways, Nazis had physically, mentally, and emotionally dehumanized their victims. The Jews were treated so badly by the Nazis that they felt as if they weren’t even humans; they felt like animals. For example, the Jewish prisoners were always being yelled at with harsh tones. Eliezer only remembers one time when a Polish
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.
Then came the ghettos.” Elie Wiesel wrote. The separation of jews started and the racism starts but nobody realizes it. “Three days later, a new decree: every jew had to wear a yellow star. Some prominent members of the community came to consult with my father, who had connections at the upper levels of the Hungarian police; they wanted to know what he thought of the situation.
“To forget the holocaust is to kill twice.” This means that if we stop remembering what happen in Germany on 1933-1945, it is like killing the people in the holocaust twice. The holocaust was an event that targeted about six million Jews and executed them. They created camps to keep the Jews in so they would have a more organized way of killing them. Furthermore i will be talking about dehumanization in the book Night, his identity and his purpose to reveal the truth on what went on in the camps of the holocaust.