Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, Recounts his first-hand experiences of Nazi atrocities in his memoir, Night as Wiesel struggles to maintain faith. Inhumanity and cruelty are two key parts relating to dehumanization in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. Inhumanity and cruelty dehumanization of Jews during the Holocaust. This cruelty is important to the theme in this book because this is what the Holocaust is about. This book focuses on the Jews of Sighet because that is where the author Elie is from, the book entails the horrendous story of one Jew and his father out of six million Jews. Cruelty is directly related to this book as a whole because it is basically what the Holocaust is about, Nazi’s and Germans mistreating Jewish people because …show more content…
(109) The Jews by lose their faith in their god when the Germans hung a little boy, and he was dangling there struggling to die, and a Jew next to Elie said “where is god when this boy is suffering?” Elie said back to the man “God is here, he is hanging from the ropes” ( 90) As a result Elie loses faith in hs god. Inhumanity and cruelty were shown when the Jews were stripped of their identity, hair, jewelry, and shoes. The Germans stripped the Jews of everything because they did not want to have individuality among the Jews in the camps. The Germans gave the Jews numbers that were tattooed on the arms so they could be kept up with. It is almost like in prison how they have numbers so they do not get mixed up or lost track of. Once they had numbers the Jews were told to go to the barracks and they were given striped blue and white uniforms. This was also savage because it was the middle of winter. The Jews wore very little clothing causing some Jews to die from the cold and …show more content…
They did this because they felt that their dads were a burden on their shoulders as if they were slowing them down and the kids could survive without them. Elie once had these feelings about his dad when in the book he said that he thought his dad was dead, but Elie instantly regretted these thoughts because he had to protect his dad. Elie thought that if his dad died, he would no longer have a reason to live. Elie felt very strong about his dad because he was always protecting him and not letting him die. In one situation he would not let the other Jews throw him out of the cattle cart when they were on their way to Gleiwitz. Elie also tried his best to stay by his father’s side no matter what, even if it meant almost getting shot; He did this because Elie’s dad also protected him during the marches by not letting him fall asleep in the snow, this was so he would not
Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night is an account of the brutality of the Holocaust faced by Elie at the age of fourteen to fifteen and the horrors he endures. Night exposes much that is wrong with human nature and reveals little that is right. During the novel, he endures loss of faith as his experience within the Holocaust becomes more difficult. The elements wrong with human nature are represented by the novel, particularly the cruelty and the ignorance. The autobiography, however, only represents little that is right, such as the memory kept in order for the events never to happen again.
Next, the Germans stripped the Jews of their faith, which is another way they dehumanized them. An example of this is that Elie stopped believing in God. According to the novel, “Blessed be God’s name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled… And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God” (Wiesel 67). The Germans were taking away the faith of the Jews by everything that they were doing in the concentration camps. They were burning children, shooting at babies, and killing Jews left and right. Since they were doing
In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, Wiesel writes about the experiences of Eliezer, his family, and fellow Jews, he explained how the Nazis gradually changes the way the Jews lived little by little. Dehumanization is the process of stripping a person of every quality that makes him human and changing them to fit their needs. Dehumanizing started when Eliezer and other Jews in his community are evacuated from their homes in Sighet. They were transported in cattle cars which related the Jews to no more than livestock. After the harsh transportation the Jews arrived at Auschwitz a concentration camp where Eliezer spent many months of his life. They were whipped, ran, and starved till some of the Jews could not take it. In Elie Wiesel book he explains how he found the stamina to survive these cruel conditions.
When living through the holocaust the SS men were continuously cruelty to keep the prisoners in fear of them so they are easy to control. Elie Wiesel uses his personal experiences from living in the camps to write the memoir Night. The memoir shows how cruelty can change a person's personality, and how they react and treat other people. Cruelty is not always a physical thing, the SS men used emotional cruelty to bend the prisoners to there will. Several cruel things happened to the prisoners, but the Nazis were not the only ones who were cruel. The prisoners became rude and ruthless to each other.
Elie Wiesel was a young boy strongly devoted to his faith, but it quickly dwindled as he experienced dehumanization. Throughout the novel Night, The Nazis conducted many acts of dehumanization upon the Jewish citizens. The Nazis harshly targeted the Jews’ humanity, and gradually softened their perception of being human. The inhumane treatment began in their very own town of Sighet and continued into various concentration camps they were forced into. Jews were brutalized in these camps and experienced many forms of mental and physical abuse. They were given tattoos in the camps, which was quite demeaning. They physically mistreated them, starved them and separated them from their loved ones.
The Nazi army degraded the Jewish people in many number of ways. One way was crushing their self esteem, they gave them numbers and referred to them by the numbers. Elie says on page 50, "I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time." This shows they did not have any confidence in themselves, they were totally oblivious to their own feelings. They were just bodies with one purpose, to die. After they got to the camp they had no way to get achievements to gain any sort of confidence. As Elie states on page 52, there was only one way to gain anything, In fact, “I was pleased with what was happening to him: my gold crown was safe. It could be useful to me
For instance, the Nazis treat the Jews like animals, no respect is given to them, they are constantly mocked and they are punished for no reason. In particular when Elie loses his name and becomes a digit he feels extremely dehumanized, " I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name." (49). Once he lost his name he feels worthless and non-existent, he is nothing but a number to the Nazis. Furthermore, all of the Jews are tattooed with their new identity, from that point they became inferior to the Nazis, something so simple as a name forced the Jews into feeling less than human. Next, the Jews experience massive changes to their bodies due to starvation when Elie is released he is hospitalized " One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me." (115). Elie's self-esteem is so impacted that it changed him mentally, he feels as if the old Elie is dead and he is a whole new person. The struggle he faces in Auschwitz change him so much he no longer recognizes himself, when he looks at himself in the mirror he sees a corpse, not just physically but also dead inside. To sum up, Elie is traumatized by the horrendous things the Nazis make him go through, his self-esteem is so impacted that he transforms into a totally different
Throughout the novel, we can understand that in the beginning, the relationship between Elie and his father was not the best because Elie believed his father cared more about the Jewish community than him. However, by the time the father and the son only had each other, they were depending on each other. Elie was only living for his father because he knew his father would not survive without him. They were both helping each other in a ways surviving. For example, Elie gave his father lessons in marching step, to help him survive (55). Also, Elie became less and less emphatic toward his dad during the concentration camp days. The Nazi sabotages the wonderful bond a father and a son had together. Elie could see his own father get beaten up and even than; he had no emotion or anger (39). Once his father got beat up with an iron bar, and Elie did nothing to help him, he just stood there (54). Even thought he had no emotion, even when his father past away, Elie said “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!...
About two-thirds of Jewish people living in Europe at the time of World War II were killed by Nazis. Elie Wiesel’s novel, Night, is about a teenage boy who was taken with his family to Auschwitz and through many of the other concentration camps. Night walks you through all the horrible and tragic events that Elie and all the other people had to endure. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses several powerful, sad, and horrifying images to demonstrate some of the horrors that occurred during the holocaust.
Approximately 6 million Jews died in the holocaust but this could happen to anybody. Hitler had a hatred for Jews and wanted all of them dead, and he found ways to kill all of them and this was known as the holocaust. The holocaust took place in World War II. Jews were targeted because of their race because Hitler had a hatred for all Jews. Elie wrote night to prevent history from repeating itself by showing dehumanization, how identity can be taken away, and to show how him and other people felt about the holocaust.
Cruelty surrounds the world constantly, and is used frequently in works of literature to reveal certain things about the theme. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, acts of cruelty are used to express the theme and enhance its message. One of the largest themes revealed by these acts is “man’s inhumanity to man,” which includes 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 it experienced it, as well as those who caused it.
Although Eliezer survived the bloodcurdling Holocaust, countless others succumbed to the Nazi’s inhumanity. The Nazi’s progressively reduced the Jewish people to being little more than “things” which were a nuisance to them. Throughout Night, dehumanization consistently took place, as the Nazis oppressed the Jewish citizens. The Germans dehumanized Eliezer, his father, and other fellow Jews for the duration of the memoir Night, which had a lasting effect on Eliezer’s identity, attitude and outlook. Wiesel displays the Nazi’s vicious actions to accentuate the way by which they dehumanize the Jewish population. The Nazis had an abundance of practices to dehumanize the Jews including beatings, starvation, separation of families, crude murders, forced labor, among other horrific actions.
The Holocaust was a horrific time period when over six million Jewish people were systematically exterminated by the Nazi government. Throughout this period, the Jews were treated particularly inhumane because the Nazi viewed their ethnicities as a disease to humanity. Dehumanization is a featured theme in Elie Wiesel’s novel about the Holocaust since he demonstrated numerous examples of the severe conditions endured by the Jewish people. The nonfiction story Night by Elie Wiesel focuses on inhumanity and reveals human beings are capable of committing great atrocities and behaving cruelly, when such actions are condoned by society, peer pressure, and ethical beliefs. Elie Wiesel uses literary devices to produce a consistent theme of inhumanity.
Dehumanization played a significant role throughout Elie Wiesel's "Night". In many historic references to the Holocaust the killing of the Jews were described as "methodical and systematical"(The Jewish Outreach Institute), though this is true, these heinous crimes were made even worse by the dehumanizing and appalling treatment and conditions that the Jews were put through. Here are some examples:
When Elie Wiesel, author of Night was just 15 years old, he and his family were taken by cattle car to a concentration camp in Auschwitz. From there, he endured ten months of torture and dehumanization in three different work camps before being liberated. In this lesson, we will learn more about the dehumanization experienced in Night.