Dehumanization is the process in which a person is deprived of their human qualities. The Nazis often used this practice on the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust as these people were stripped of their humanity, and many examples of this can be found in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. 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. While some Jews’ lives were immediately taken by the Nazis at the entrance to the camps, the ones who stayed alive were who suffered …show more content…
“He leapt on me like a wild animal, hitting me in the chest, his blows growing more and more violent, until I was covered with blood”(Wiesel 60). This was just one of the times in Night where physical violence was used to take the life out of the Jews. They were constantly beaten, most of the time over insignificant reasons, because the Nazis did not want them to fight back. After this particular instance where Elie was beaten by Idek, Elie became significantly quieter in his protests against the Nazi officers. He would not go out of his way to help his fellow prisoners anymore. Even while watching his father get battered Elie thought to himself, “I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. This is what concentration camp life had made of me”(Wiesel 63). The Nazis physically beat the lives out of the Jews. Over time, Elie and the other prisoner’s presences became lesser and lesser because they did not have any strength left inside
“ Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow”. Even though everyone was being abused, no one said anything about it. The abuse continues. After a substantial amount of time spent in the concentration camps, many Jews lost faith, especially after enduring the brutality of the camps. While in the concentration camps, the Jews went through many horrific beatings.
Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or a group of positive human qualities. This process was widely used across concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Hitler used this tactic to gain power over the people he imprisoned. Dehumanization is a disturbing process that nobody should have to endure and its terrible that so many innocent people had to experience it. Dehumanization makes people lose the will to live and made it easier for the Nazi’s to exterminate the Jews.
A single needle attached to a pen holder took away someone’s identity. A pair of disheveled, ill-fitting rags stripped someone of their individuality. Depriving someone of basic necessities took away their soul. Upon arrival at the camps Elie and his father were separated from his female family members, never to see them again. Immediately, Elie along with the other prisoners were subjected to camp life.
Thousands of Jewish prisoners were killed per day in concentration camps. The way the Nazis succeeded in killing this much Jews was by creating gas chambers and crematoriums. First, in the novel night, Elie Wiesel described how he witnessed dozens of “children being thrown into the flames.” Wiesel was told when he arrived to Auschwitz that “Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney.
Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities, according to the dictionary. Throughout Night it shows a lot of dehumanization examples. It would take hours to name all of them. Some of the ways dehumanization was showed in Night was all of the abuse, having no identity except for a number, and the hunger they felt because they would only get one meal per day.
In the book, Night, Dehumanization majorly affects the Jews. Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to little more than things. It makes the Jews want to give up. There are many examples of dehumanization, including beating, selection, and robbery. Eliezer was whipped in front of everyone during roll call, “…I shall therefore try to make him understand clearly once and for all…I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip.
This is a perfect example of the toll their captivity took on their minds and bodies while staying in the camps. Another great example of the physical torture the prisoners received was when Elie’s father was slapped “with such force that he fell down,” (pp. 39). Elie had been in the camp for only a day, but that’s all it took for him to remain silent and do nothing when he saw the abuse happen to his
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.
Inhumane In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the theme man's inhumanity man relates to cruelty by calling them names, treating them horribly, and making them look the same. Even the Jews in the same barracks fight each other for food, and some people suffocate because they are laying on top of each other. In this quote “Faster you swine”(Wiesel 91). This quote shows the reader how the Nazis treated the Jews when they are marching to Gleiwitz.
For starters, when Eliezer and the other prisoners got to Auschwitz they were forced to get a tattoo of numbers, the only name the Nazi’s will call him. Miserably the Jews filed past a table, “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). This shows the dehumanization of Eliezer because now he is referred to as a number rather than a human being with a name. Another example of dehumanization occurs in the beginning when they were crammed into cattle cars.
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.
Dehumanization is a major of human cruelty. This quote shows the dehumanization that the Nazis were putting forth on 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
“What happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent” (Wiesel 39). Many of the prisoners were subject to abuse both mentally and physically and were in turn affected both mentally and socially. Prisoners commonly became dehumanized and in the case of Elie and his father, became more distant socially.
Elie’s dad was struck even though he asked to go to the bathroom politely. The Gypsy officer did this just to intimidate the prisoners of the concentration camps. Next, the SS officers show that there is no mercy in the concentration camps. He was about to signal, “his aides to pull the chair from under the young man’s feet when the latter shouted, in a
Visualize a place where belongings and rights as a human beings are stripped away, psychological warfare and harsh labor is forced upon individuals in unsanitary conditions, and listening to screams echoing and guns firing. These were but a few of the horrors prisoners would experience in the massive Nazi run concentration camp known as Auschwitz. The most nefarious of the Nazi camps, Auschwitz was made up of three individual camps plus sub camps which allowed it to perform mass murder, degradation, and theft of belongings more effectively than any other concentration camp used for Hitler’s Final Solution. After interpreting the activities that occurred and Auschwitz I, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Auschwitz III, it can be determined without hesitation that Auschwitz Concentration Camps were perpetrators of the Holocaust.