Night Analysis

Through encountering horrific events during his life, Elie Wiesel has discovered, “When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity”. Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the Holocaust; in May 1944, when Wiesel was only 15 years old, the Nazis deported him and his family to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. His mother and the youngest of his three sisters died at Auschwitz, while he and his father were later transported to another camp, Buchenwald, located in Germany. Throughout reading Night I’ve learned from the perspective of a victim himself how life-ruining the Holocaust had become. Wiesel himself stated that “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the …show more content…
It is quite clear that dehumanization is the main theme of Night because it describes how the Jews are stripped not only of their clothes, but of their human qualities during the time of the Holocaust. Throughout Wiesel’s journey, examples of dehumanization and other elements such as hope, despair, memory, innocence, witness, and faith are present throughout the novel. Such visions appear later on in the book when Eliezer reaches Auschwitz. At concentration camps like Auschwitz, the Nazis seemed to be treating them as if they are animals: “Our clothes had been left behind in the other block, and we had been promised other outfits.Toward midnight, we were told to run” (38). There are moments of despair present at the very beginning of the book when Moishe the Beadle tries to warn the Jews of what terrible things are to come and nobody believes him. “‘They think I’m mad’ he whispered, and tears, like drops of wax, flowed from his eyes” (7). After being deported from the ghetto, Eliezer suffers through a long ride in a hermetically sealed train car. The things he encounters are unforgettable, and not in a good