Night By Elie Wiesel: An Analysis

During World War II, Hitler’s Nazi party treated the Jewish community with incomparable cruelty inside the concentration camps that had been created. The death camps housed thousands of Jews, during which they endured the harshest of treatments. In the novella, Night by Elie Wiesel, it is described how the Jewish community’s identity is taken from them by the way the Germans, and even themselves dehumanize them with labels as well as how they are treated.
Throughout Hitler’s time as Chancellor of Germany, the Nazis labeled the Jewish people as less than human. For instance, when the three “veteran” prisoners “tattooed numbers on [their] left arms, [Wiesel] became A-7713” (Wiesel 42). In having them tattooed, the Nazis took away any kind of identity and individuality the Jews had by removing their names and making them nothing but a series of numbers and letters. Taking away their names, in a sense, took away who they are and therefore reduced them to feel like they are less than human beings. Additionally, the Jewish community is labeled as animals when they were running in the cold, “if one of [them] stopped for a second, a quick shot eliminated the filthy dog” (Weisel 85). As Weisel says this, it becomes clear that he himself is starting to believe that they are nothing more than filthy animals because he as a Jew is describing the community he belongs to as animals because it is what has been said time after time by the Nazis, who think of the Jewish community as less than human beings. Furthermore, the Jews are …show more content…
These inhumane treatments not only degraded the Jews, but it made them numb to everything, leaving them as emotionless shells who felt dead inside, left only to remember the cruel treatments and horrible conditions in which they