Examples Of Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

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The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel demonstrates the struggles that persecuted prisoners face inside the camps during the Holocaust. Between 1939-1945, more than six million people were imprisoned in concentration and death camps by the Nazi soldiers. Most of these people were Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists. In the memoir, Eliezer is a Jewish teenager who is imprisoned in various camps and faces daily brutality from the Nazi’s. Mental, physical, and emotional dehumanization cause the prisoners to become seriously damaged in many ways. The Nazi’s dehumanize their victims in various ways. The Nazi’s dehumanize their victims physically by forcing them to live on a soup and bread diet. This therefore causes them to become…show more content…
Being in the camps mentally destroys him. Eliezer, along with the other prisoners, lose faith in God and the Jewish religion. In the novel, Eliezer gets so angry that he says, “Why, but why would I bless him? Every fiber in me rebelled” (Wiesel 67). This is significant because Eliezer entered the camp as an Orthodox Jew with a passion for religion. By this point of the novel, it is Rosh Hashanah and Eliezer does not believe that God should be blessed as a result of the fact that he does not believe that God is real anymore. Eliezer begins to believe that it is every man for himself inside the camps, and that he cannot always look after his father. These feelings are mentally tough on children. Furthermore, mental dehumanization takes a big toll on Eliezer because it, in turn, causes physical and emotional dehumanization. He is no longer happy or cheerful. He thinks about food all the time, but never gets enough and he becomes malnourished. Eliezer begins to lose faith in himself as well and no longer wants to live. The events in Night connect to the novel The Hunger Games. In The Hunger Games, the characters are dehumanized as well. The tributes are pitted against one another and must turn against each other in order to survive, in a similar fashion to the prisoners during the Holocaust turning on each other. This takes a mental toll on the tributes, and they begin to go crazy and lose faith in themselves, similar to Eliezer losing faith in himself. Physically, the tributes are not well fed, in the same way the Holocaust victims are under fed and deprived of a well balanced diet. Dehumanization causes people to become less than themselves, and the prisoners during the Holocaust experience this process. Mental, physical, and emotional dehumanization all take major tolls on the victims of the

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