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Dehumanization In Night Research Paper

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Dehumanization In Night Research Paper
Faith Stolzer
World History II
Kenneth Barnes
18 November 2015
Dehumanization in Night by Elie Wiesel
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, Eliezer is a young boy who lived in a small Jewish town called Sighet; during the middle of World War II. Eliezer was a strong willed boy, who loved to learn and study Jewish law and tradition. Even if his father didn’t allow him to study all forms of Judaism; Eliezer did anyway. Like the mystical form of Judaism called the cabbala. In the beginning of the war Eliezer’s father and other important figures in Sighet heard of the anti-sematic actions of the German army, but brushed it off. Even when Eliezer’s secret teacher, Moshe the Beadle, is exiled due to an anti-sematic act, they go about their lives as normal. When Moshe escapes and returns with stories
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This stripped the Jews of one of the most unique things about their individuality. “I became A-7713, from then on I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). And once again the Germans had taken a bit of Human from the Jews.
Many factors contributed to the reason that the Germans tried to dehumanize the Jews in the concentration camps, partly so that they would lose the will to live. I feel like the German soldiers, ruthless as they were to the Jews, needed to dehumanize the Inmates because they didn’t have enough immortality to kill. But since the Jews were viewed, treated, and forced to live like animals, the German soldiers didn’t feel as wrong killing them.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, he describes the way that the Jewish people in Europe were dehumanized and treated like animals. Starting with Anti-sematic laws that took away citizenship from the Jews, then moving into the concentration camps like the one Eliezer and his family were at, Auschwitz, where the Jewish people were stripped of their personal identity, clothing, and

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