To Kill A Mockingbird And Night By Elie Wiesel

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“Was there a single place here where you were not in danger of death?” (Wiesel
37). That was a quote from Elie Wiesel’s book Night, an autobiography of his life through the Holocaust. The Holocaust took place from January 30, 1933 - May 8, 1945 (Wikipedia). The Holocaust was a genocide in which approximately six million Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and its collaborators (Wikipedia). Two years after the Holocaust started, in 1935 a story To Kill A Mockingbird touched on the concept of racism in the south. Especially racism against black people in the south was horrible. From having gone from slavery, to still not having rights and respect any human being should get. Both books touch on discrimination, oppression, and violence
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In Night, discrimination happens when Wiesel and other Jews (including his family) were forced to move to a gated community. There was propaganda of how Jews “looked like” making them have big noses with scrunched up faces. They made them seem ugly and evil looking. The posters were everywhere basically saying if you did not look Aryan blonde hair, blue eyes usually) you were not human. Similar things in a way happened in To Kill A Mockingbird. White skin was favored, black skin was not and if you were mixed you were considered a hybrid of some sort and was not clarified as a human. They viewed black people as not humans. In the eyes of the whites, black people were slaves. Back in the south they had segregation between white people and black people. The difference between Night and To Kill A Mockingbird with discrimination is in Night is that they were pushed into concentration camps without knowing what was going on. In To Kill A Mockingbird it was all around them. Tom Robinson and the rest of the black community faced it. Even Scout got a taste of how it felt to be different from others when her cousin was saying racial slurs about Atticus. “He’s nothin’ but a n***er-lover!” (Lee 110) “N***er-lover!” he yelled (110). In short, that is how discrimination is seen in Night and To Kill A …show more content…
In Night oppression happens when the Holocaust. For example, the whole entire Holocaust was just oppression. The Jews were denied opportunities and equalities under the law. They were not allowed to learn, to read or to attend school. Nazi’s forced then to work without pay and made them fear for their lives daily. In To Kill A Mockingbird the same things go on with the black community. Tom Robinson and the rest of the black community did not have the same rights and equality as the rest of the town. Ton Robinson, if he had the same equality he did not have to help out with Mayella Ewell, but because she was white and he was black it was almost that he was obligated to. “I said come here, n***er, and bust up this chiffarobe for me, I gotta nickel for you.” (Lee 241). They use racial slurs as they use for slaves. It dates back to slavery. Mayella Ewell called him over like they would to a slave when he was just a man passing by their house. Just like the Holocaust. They went through forced labour and felt like they did not belong. That there was no hope for them. It was like both races were slaves to white people. They were both judged unfairly. Like it says, “... you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climbed into his skin and walk around in it.” (Lee 39). The differences between them was the Holocaust lasted 12 years while slavery lasted for 246

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