Dehumanization In Eliezer Wiesel's Night

Night The holocaust was a time when Jews were prosecuted by the Nazis under Hitler’s rule in the years 1933-1945. People who survived the holocaust speak of what they went through; others tell their story through writing. Eliezer Wiesel (Elie) a survivor of the holocaust and he told his story through a book called “Night”. Night is about what Elie lived and thought during Word War II. He speaks of what he felt during the time when little by little he was being moved into one concentration camp into another. Night is a powerful book that contains unbelievable truth. What makes it unbelievable is how Elie writes it, describing it deeply so you can picture what is going on in each scene. In the beginning Elie describes how the townspeople …show more content…
This sentence gives the readers a quick picture how humans were treated as things and not treated as a human should be treated by comparing babies as targets. “You must get completely undressed... Run as if the devil were after you! Don’t look at the SS. Run, straight in front of you!” is another example of dehumanization. In this part of the book Jews were ordered to strip and run in order to pass a test for survival. This is an example of how Elie, his father and his fellow Jews were humiliated. A final example of how Elie and other Jews were dehumanized was when they were asked to leave their homes and were moved into the ghetto “Faster! I had no strength left. The journey had only just begun, and I felt so weak...” They had little time to pack their most precious belongings and move out before something worse happened; they were taken out of their own homes into the …show more content…
Though, the fact that there was a chance that a family member was alive was not grate but there was still hope. In the book Eliezer lied to Stein, his relative, about his family being alive because Eliezer felt that if he lied, Stein will still have a motive to stay alive. In my opinion I think Eliezer was morally right because he tried to save someone’s life even if it cost lying to him. The fact that he knew if he told Stein the truth he would have no motive to live. The significance of “night” in the novel is to describe in one word what Eliezer thought of the years he spent in the concentration camp. Night is described as a dark day in this case dark years. “Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.” This sentence is an example of how Eliezer thought he was living his life in darkness. Another example of how Eliezer felt was when he wrote “The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark fame had entered into my soul and devoured it.” In here he describes how in one night everything can change; the child he was is no more. Eliezer was liberated on April 10th