Humanity Vs. Dehumanization In Elie Wiesel's Night

Improved Essays
Elie Wiesel and every prisoner of the Holocaust fought with the tension Humanity vs. Dehumanization throughout the book “Night”. At the beginning of the novel Elie and the rest Jews had a regular life. They went to the Synagogue they spent time with families. They were ordinarily human beings. Nonetheless when the Hungarian police started to round up Jews everything began to change. The Jewish people were dehumanized, reduced to no more than objects. The Hungarian yelled at them and did not care what they felt. For example, on page 15 the Hungarian police yelled “’Faster, Faster! Get on with you lazy swine!’” Also on page 79 when Elie and his father are in Buchenwald concentration camp and Elie’s dad got dysentery "…This doctor has only come

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In this book, Elie Wiesel describes his terrifying experience he endured while being detained in several concentration camps. He witnesses the deaths of hundreds of innocent Jews throughout his experience, and he learns how to survive and take care of his father. Therefore, in Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, the German Army dehumanizes Elie Wiesel and the Jewish prisoners by depriving them of physiological needs, love, and self esteem. The Nazi army dehumanized the Jewish people by depriving them of physiological needs.…

    • 689 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night Elie Wiesel Change

    • 811 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Deaths in the Holocaust was something that occurred on a daily basis, that’s a well known fact, but there were also many survivors when the camp was seized. Although, Elie Wiesel’s stunning and well-written novel, “Night”, is one that helped him win the Nobel Peace Prize. The memoir is about the year Elie spent in Auschwitz with his father. There are tales of gruesome incidents that took place in the camp, from strenuous work conditions to just the pure insanity of the officers of the camp. In the novel by Elie Wiesel, the events in the book affect Elie because his health diminished, he lost hold of his identity, and he lost his humanity.…

    • 811 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Night by Elie Wiesel is the retelling of events that Wiesel, his father, and other Jewish captives faced in German concentration camps during the end of World War II. Dehumanization was one of the many tortures faced by Jews throughout the Holocaust. Dehumanization is the action of making someone worth nothing by stripping a person of basic human rights. A few human rights taken from Wiesel and the rest of the Jews at the time was the use of names, being treated as though they were trash, being ordered to work until they could no longer continue, being fed at specific times in small portions, the list goes on as the Germans showed no sympathy towards their prisoners.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Imagery of Dehumanization in Night Over the course of almost two millennia, anti-Semitism has constantly presented itself in European conflicts in the form of blaming, scapegoating, and prejudice against the Jews. During the Holocaust, this incessant hatred led to the identification and deportation of millions of people from their homes, the concentration in the camps, and extermination of entire families and Jewish communities at once. For nearly a decade, Jews, prisoners-of-war, homosexuals, and the disabled were rounded up, sent off to camps, and systematically slaughtered in unimaginably inhumane ways. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, shares his experiences at Auschwitz in the memoir Night, which reveals the true extent of inhumanity…

    • 1486 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Negative Remembrance The Holocaust was a time in history when many were killed for no reason but pure hatred. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, wrote a memoir to express his experiences throughout his horrific journey. The novel Night by Elie Wiesel is a memoir that was written to share Wiesel's personal experiences during the Holocaust. In Night, there are many examples of cruelty through Elie’s many atrocious experiences.…

    • 544 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Spencer O’Brien English 10 Juskidus October 17th, 2017 Inhumanity in Humanity In Night, Elie Wiesel shows how millions of Jewish people were taken by the Nazis, placed into concentration camps and systematically killed. As prisoners, they were beaten regularly, starved, forced to live in horrendous conditions and were even stripped of their names. Overtime, the jews began to completely forget who they once were. As for the Nazis, they would tease, torture, and kill prisoners so often that it no longer seemed inhumane to them. Elie Wiesel demonstrates how the Holocaust brought out the most inhumane and savage side of both the prisoners and the Nazis SS guards.…

    • 743 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    About 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. The book Night written by Elie Wiesel is his account of what occurred to him and the others around him during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the worst genocide in the world because the Nazis killed people of any age, the concentration camps had the worst possible conditions, and the Nazis treated the prisoners like animals. One reason the Holocaust was the worst genocide in the world is the Nazis killed people of any age. One piece of evidence that shows this is “They were burning something.…

    • 1217 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    There they are rescued by Americans and a resistance group that attacked the camp. Sadly Elie’s father died in Buchenwald before the rescue due to a sickness and being sent to the crematory. Dehumanization of the Jewish people in “Night” ,by Elie Wiesel, happened in a variety of ways and helped Hitler achieve his ideas about Jewish people. In “night” we see how the Jewish people are being oppressed and dehumanized in so many ways.…

    • 1050 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    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.…

    • 500 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Elie Wiesel Effectiveness

    • 1029 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. And yet, I sense their presence. I always do..,” (p.118). In the book Night, written by Elie Wiesel a Jewish man that survived the Holocaust unlike so many others. “And how many devout Jews endured such death?”…

    • 1029 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Approximately 1 out of every 6 Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner was murdered, fortunately Eliezer Wiesel defeated those odds and came out of it as a survivor. The book ‘Night’ is a memoir written by holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel who paints a clear picture on his experience of being forced to leave everything that made him who he was, to coming out of the camp: Auschwitz-Birkenau, nearly on the brink of death. His book demonstrates the callousness of the Nazi party and the suffering he and his people faced day and night, never getting a break from the experimental torture, gas chambers, starvation, illnesses and death knocking at their door. Being a prisoner at Auschwitz, Wiesel 's overall identity took a turn as he lost his faith in god…

    • 1096 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the novel Elie Wiesel is taken from his home in Sighet and to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, or factories of death. Only his father is with him, Elie faces truly unimaginable horrors by friends and family, prisoners, and worst of all the Nazi’s with the most dehumanizing treatment. The prisoners greatly contributed to the the dehumanization “Holding flashlights and sticks, they began to strike at u left and right…”(Wiesel 28). This shows the…

    • 704 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In just over one hundred pages of sparse and fragmented description, Elie Wiesel’s Night conveys the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust while putting on display the loss of humanity that he was forced to bear witness to in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Not only is Elie forced to watch the degradation of basic moral values and characteristics of his fellow man, but he is also left to question the morality of his own God. Even more horrifying, Elie is subjected to situations in which his own values falter when presented with certain situations. This especially occurs in those situations that endangered his own ability of self-preservation, despite his resistance to the stripping of his basic human values. [However,…

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the book Night, Elie Wiesel describes his life in the concentrations camps of the Holocaust, and his experiences that pushed him into dehumanization. Dehumanization is what the soldiers in the camps tried to do to the prisoners. Make them feel like animals, like they were below even the lowliest of human beings. Leaving them so that their only care in the world is not their family, nor their friends, but their life, and their life alone.…

    • 1053 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    “In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die” (Elie Wiesel). This alternate universe is nothing but one of destruction: the death of the soul. When one is constantly being beaten down, one no longer desires to live. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Jewish people lose their desire to live as a consequence of enduring extreme dehumanization at the hands of the Nazis.…

    • 1375 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays