A Brief Review Of Elie Wiesel's Night

Elie Wiesel’s Night teaches about the Holocaust from the perspective of a Jewish boy named Eliezer. Reading and analyzing Night has conveyed points about the Holocaust that differ from topics that I have studied in the past. The main point of my analyzation of Night is the dehumanization of the Nazis’ victims, mainly in concentration camps. Many past Holocaust books and movies that I have studied focus more on the events that happen before the concentration camps, but Night takes place almost entirely in the camps. It helps me to see the Holocaust from a different perspective than the one that I have been seeing it from every year. The three types of dehumanization that are focused on are mental, physical, and emotional. To begin with, I was informed that the Nazis mentally dehumanized their prisoners in the concentration camps. One of the most traumatic examples of this is the way they are forced to watch their fellow prisoners die right in front of them. When Eliezer is reflecting on his first night in the concentration camps he says, “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky” (Wiesel 34). Eliezer has already seen children be cremated and turned into ash, and he has only been in the camp for one night. The trauma of watching multiple children be murdered and not knowing whether you might be next is …show more content…
The book emphasizes the dehumanization of Nazi prisoners in the concentration camps. The dehumanization can be broken up into the categories mental, physical, and emotional. Eliezer is affected by all three types of dehumanization, which helped me to see the effects from a first person perspective. Most of the Holocaust learning that I have done in the past did not give first person accounts of life inside of the camps. This difference gave me a new way to look at the