Throughout the course of humanity, we have experienced terrible transgressions in our society. Although they took place sixty-one years apart, similar horrific events from the Holocaust (1933-1945) and the Rwandan Genocide (1994) occurred. In Night, the Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state sponsored persecution and murder of approximately 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. The Nazis believed they were “racially superior” so they killed the Jews because they were deemed “inferior” and needed to be eliminated.
Hotel Rwanda tackles a recent event in history where the Hutu extremists of Rwanda initiated a terrifying campaign of genocide, massacring approximately 800,000 minority Tutsi who had been given total power by the Belgian colonists, while the rest of the world looked on and did nothing. The Hutu killed the Tutsi people because they thought the Tutsi were being excessively rude to them. It is important to recognize the similarities in Night and Hotel Rwanda because if we did not keep a close watch on these prejudice actions, the world would be a very bitter and non-diverse place. Night and Hotel Rwanda are both based on true stories about genocide and share similar situations such as the Nazis and Hutus called the Jews and the Tutsis degrading names, the Jews and Tutsis had to travel in tight spaces, and watching people get badly beaten by the Nazis and the Hutus.
The first similarity in Night and Hotel Rwanda is that the Jews and the Tutsis were called degrading names. In Night, the Nazis called the Jews “dogs” because the Jews were dirty, and fought for every little crumb of bread off of the ground. The Hutu referred to the Tutsi people as “cockroaches” in Hotel Rwanda because the Tutsi needed to be stepped on and crushed. Both of these names are spiteful representations of hatred towards the prejudice actions between the Nazis and Jews, and the Hutus and Tutsis.