Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

Night Essay

Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities. During the Holocaust, Jews were brutally treated by Nazis. In the memoir Night, written by Eliezer Wiesel, he, his family, and his fellow Jews are not considered human by the Nazis. Some examples of dehumanization of these Jews, are not having names, fighting for food like animals, and finally, separation from their family. The first example would be not having names.

During the Holocaust, Jews were subjected to getting numbers and letters tattooed on their forearm to replace their original names. “We were told to roll up our left sleeves and file past the table. The three “veteran” prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arms. I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.” (42) This is dehumanizing because everyone is born with a name and has a right to keep it. In this case, their name is being taken away from them. Being assigned a number takes away not only one’s

The Jews were forced into marching against their will to survive. The Jews would also receive little rations of food. When they went on their march to Buchenwald because the Russians were on their way to Auschwitz, they had tinier portions of food. “One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest.” This example shows the Jews fighting like animals over crumbs of bread, a man threw towards them. It also shows how hungry and how little food they received in the concentration camps. Every morsel they found, could not be overlooked, because it could mean another day of survival. Starvation was a powerful weapon during the Holocaust to break a Jew’s will to want to live. Breaking them off from their family was even