Vincent Johnson
Period 3
February 16, 2023
Rough Draft - Elie Wiesel’s Night: Dehumanization Explanatory Essay
The process of Dehumanization is one of the most cruel things ever. You have men,women and children as some type of tool bending to the will of one supreme ruler and throughout this you will just be the cattle that are there for their entertainment. Elie Wiesel at 12 years old had to go through his horrible experience with fellow Jews at the holocaust. They were slaughtered like animals for the simple things, forced to do unimaginable labor work and even had to watch as their loved ones around them fell before them. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel shows the dangers of inaction by exposing how the Nazis dehumanized the Jews through
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Elie Wiesel shows a way of dehumanization in his memoir Night from how their freedom was taken away from the Jewish people. When Elie and the Other Jews were first being taken away by Hiterler German army.“From that moment on, everything happened very quickly. The race toward death had begun. First edict: Jews were prohibited from leaving their residences for three days, under penalty of death.Moishe the Beadle came running to our house. "I warned you," he shouted. And left without waiting for a response. The same day, the Hungarian police burst into every Jewish home in town: a Jew was henceforth forbidden to own gold, jew-elry, or any valuables. Everything had to be handed over to the authorities, under penalty of death. My father went down to the cellar and buried our savings” (Wiesel 10-11). This is another form of the Jewish people being dehumanized because their freedom to go wherever they wanted was taken away. They had no free will to make choices of their own; they had to follow what they were told. And they couldn’t own anything valuable at all either so they had nothing to their name but their life and soon that was about to be …show more content…
The prisoners were told to go to the doctors but before then they had to undress. "In a few moments, selection will take place. You will have to undress completely. Then you will go, one by one, before the SS doctors. I hope you will all pass. But you must try to increase your chances. Before you go into the next room, try to move your limbs, give yourself some color. Don't walk slowly, run! Run as if you had the devil at your heels! Don't look at the SS. Run, straight in front of you!" ( Wiesel 71). They had their dignity constantly stripped away from them at this moment they were told to be naked for the doctor but not just that they dance around and run past the SS the way pass embarrassing. After a while when things got really hard the rest of the prisoners just let go of their human quilts in order to survive. “There was shoving and jostling as if this were the ultimate haven, the gateway to life. People trod over numbed bodies, trampled wounded faces. There were no cries, only a few moans. My father and I were thrown to the ground by this rolling tide. From beneath me came a desperate cry: "You're crushing m e … h a v e mercy!" The voice was familiar. "You're crushing m e … m e r c y , have mercy!" The same faint voice, the same cry I had heard somewhere
The text also says, “Imagine having to leave behind all you had earned and saved…for people who hated you” (Paragraphs 1 and 2.) This quote shows that the Germans forced Jewish people to give out their property to all Germans. Even if the Jewish protest, they will still force
Man’s Inhumanity Towards Man Trapped in a world full of hatred between one man to another. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel gives countless examples of Nazi Cruelty towards Jews to emphasize the theme of man’s inhumanity to man. From a first-person point of view, a 15-year-old boy witnesses Nazi cruelty to not only others, but himself as well. Within the first few days of being at Auschwitz the Concentration Camp, after being separated from his mother and sisters, a “veteran” prisoner trying to strike fear in the eyes of his beholders exclaims, “Do you see that
Those Who Ceased to be Men “Never shall I forget that night,” (34); one of the most well-known quotes from Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, which details Elie’s lurid experience in concentration camps during World War II. His story shares how the German’s infringe on the homes of the Jewish people and ship them off to various camps, either to be cremated, or to die of starvation, exhaustion, and dehydration. The people in the memoir, and in other concentration camps, suffer greatly from dehumanization and desensitization. There came a point when the Jewish people did not even see themselves as men anymore, and as the story progressed they became numb to the deaths around them, they were also treated like and animals by the leaders in the camps.
The Haunting of Deprivation Have you ever had something that you cared about stripped from your possession? It does not even have to be a physical object that was confiscated. Think of how you felt. The suffering Jews in the Holocaust experienced the same feeling you have, but more severe. In the story Night, by Elie Wiesel, he recounts his experience of surviving through the horrific Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a genocide of European Jews during World War II, from 1941 to 1945. It killed about 6 million European Jewish people. What in every concentration camp Nazis would dehumanize. Dehumanization is treating a group or a person as less than a human and depriving them of the essential needs of a person. In his emotional memoir Night, Elie Wiesel demonstrates the dehumanization of the Jews in the concentration camps by highlighting how little by little they were giving up on their God and how they were treating them like animals.
Kate Johnson Ms. Nikolai ELA English 10 Sophomore Academy 02-01-23 Dehumanization Night by Elie Wiesel is a memoir that recounts witnesses to his experiences in multiple concentration camps during the Holocaust. Many people were kept in concentration camps for years during World War II, and while they faced many hardships and fought many battles, possibly the hardest challenge to overcome was that of dehumanization. Dehumanization is the act of regarding, representing, or treating a person or group as less than human, (dictionary.com). During his experiences, Elie witnessed many instances where he, his family, or other Jews in the camps were treated so inhumanely that they felt reduced to little more than ‘things’. The Nazis were harsh, cruel,
Jonah Wright English II Mrs. M. Scott February 21, 2023 Dehumanization of the Jews in Night Dehumanization is the denial of full humaneness in others and the cruelty and suffering that accompanies it. Throughout the book Night by Elie Wiesel, these accounts of dehumanization, starvation, and deprivation are shown. In the year 1944, The SS Officers transported the people of Sighet to a concentration camp called Auschwitz. There at Auschwitz was a form of punishment for the Jews, they experienced physical and mental torture identity loss and denial of food and water. These cruel treatments led to the dehumanization of the Jews which is exactly what Hitler planned.
“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.
The laws that were passed by the Nazis, between 1932 and 1938, served to dispossess the Jews of all their assets. During the beginning of Hitler’s dictatorship, governments at all levels such as Reich, state and municipal had made hundreds of laws, decrees, directives, guidelines, and regulations that restricted the human rights of the Jews in Germany. On 18 March 1938 The Gun Law was passed which excludes a Jewish gun merchant, which means the Jews could not own guns. 26 April 1938 there was a law called ‘Order for the Disclosure of Jewish Assets’ which required Jews to give in all property of 5,000 Reichsmarks. 3 October 1938, ‘Decree on the Confiscation of Jewish Property’ allows the assets from Jews to Germans leaving the jews with nothing.
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.
Dehumanization In the novel, Night, Elie Wiesel tells his story of his survival throughout the horrible event of the Holocaust, where inhumane treatment of Jews shattered their faith in humanity and hope. The Jews were stripped of their nature and were treated like meaningless humans, their purpose and existence meaning nothing to the Nazis as they were seen as nothing but a nuisance. Ridden of their names, soon known as numbers, and having to have seen the atrocities these Jews were exposed to was unreasonable and horrid treatment. Because of this extreme dehumanization that occurred during this time, it serves today as a way to remember those whose lives were taken and to impact society on how such behavior against harmless people can devastate
The German officer shouted, “There are eighty of you in the car, if anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs” (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans thought nothing of them. Instead the Germans compared the Jews to being like “dogs”, which showed that the Germans thought Jews were not worthy of being treated like a human. In conclusion, in World War II, the Jews were dehumanized because of their beliefs, they were treated as unworthy objects that are a burden to
Dehumanization in Night Innocent people change gruesomely when they are stripped of their humanity. Elie Wiesel’s Night narrates the author’s struggles to survive the Nazi party’s attempted annihilation of the Jewish people during WWII. Elie describes in his testimony that the Nazis seperate those under attack from their sense of humanity by treating them as worthless chores to empower their apathetic methods of genocide. An article elaborates that for those under persecution, “there is no soul, no self.
In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.
“Where is the so-called mercy of which you demand for gracious sakes?” A passionate supplication, shouted to his Maker only to go unheard, absorbed in an unending darkness, or so he thought, having caught a faint whispering in the distance. Rolling over a windless landscape, a flurry of broken sentences, words, hushed tones spun, tumbled and shivered over the other.