Throughout the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel experiences multiple instances of dehumanization and loss of identity. He and those around him are not seen as people by the Nazis, but as expendable resources, workers who don’t matter to them or to anyone else. Auschwitz was a terrible place filled with despair and unspeakable acts, such so that Elie and his fellow prisoners began to lose hope and the will to live because of this. They saw so many terrible deeds performed and became desensitized to this violence and atrocity, which in turn caused some part of their humanity to leave them. This dehumanization contributes to the way we see the Holocaust today. These things that happened show us how awful the situation really was, and how it should never
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The SS did not use the prisoners’ names, choosing instead to call them by number. “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.”(p. 42). Elie was not treated as a human being with a name and an identity, but as an object, a gear in a machine. The prisoners also face many other examples of dehumanization that eventually degrade their will to live and to go on. All the terrible things they’ve seen weigh heavily on them, and they begin to lose their hope and faith. Early on in the novel, Elie goes past a cremation pit in Birkenau and sees babies being thrown into the flaming ashes. The babies were not being treated as people, and just seeing this makes him start to lose his sense of humanity. The lack of cleanliness, good food, and freedom as well as senseless and brutal murders all contribute to this. Elie also begins to become desensitized, immune to all the horror that is going on around him. He loses the ability to feel in a way, which is a main part of his humanity that the camps have taken away from him. “I heard the pounding of my heart. The thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitz and Birkenau, in the crematoria, no longer troubled
The SS did not use the prisoners’ names, choosing instead to call them by number. “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.”(p. 42). Elie was not treated as a human being with a name and an identity, but as an object, a gear in a machine. The prisoners also face many other examples of dehumanization that eventually degrade their will to live and to go on. All the terrible things they’ve seen weigh heavily on them, and they begin to lose their hope and faith. Early on in the novel, Elie goes past a cremation pit in Birkenau and sees babies being thrown into the flaming ashes. The babies were not being treated as people, and just seeing this makes him start to lose his sense of humanity. The lack of cleanliness, good food, and freedom as well as senseless and brutal murders all contribute to this. Elie also begins to become desensitized, immune to all the horror that is going on around him. He loses the ability to feel in a way, which is a main part of his humanity that the camps have taken away from him. “I heard the pounding of my heart. The thousands of people who died daily in Auschwitz and Birkenau, in the crematoria, no longer troubled