night essay

Night essay The book Night was an autobiography of Eliezer Wiesel. This was a horrible story and sobering tale of his life story that shows a lot of dehumanization. Hitler with his army of Nazis brought down many group of different people but the ones that were treated the worse where the Jews. Mobs took over their homes and business. The memories of night has lots of examples. To begin with “veteran prisoners needles in hands, tattooed numbers on our left arm’’ (42). To not be able to be called your name and instead a number makes you think about what people must have gone through to do this to someone. “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name’’ (42). To give someone a number on their arm is like scaring them for life of the horrible experience they are going through. One of the biggest ways of dehumanizing was the amount of food they were given. Every day the men were given one ration of bread and soup. Then men will do anything or trade anything to get an extra proportion of food. There were many people that would die from starvation every day. Wiesel describes that “a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon-Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs” (100). This is showing that the starvation is making the men act like animals. “I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him” (106). This symbolizes that their loves ones don’t matter anymore they only care about their survival. By the end almost every men looks like a walking skeleton because of the lack of food and nutrition.
Third example of dehumanization during the holocaust was the conditions of its victims that they had to endure. From the beginning the space were way over crowed. “We remained lying on the floor for days and nights, one on top of the other, never uttering a word. We were nothing but frozen bodies. Our eyes closed, we merely waited for the next stop, to unload our dead” (100). From the being so crowed they were relieved when the train stopped to take the dead’s so they could have a little more space. Once the winter arrived the conditions became worse from the lack of proper preparation to the change in weather. The people were more exposed to disease, harsh labors, throughout all this they were trying to survive. That’s amazing for me. The last reason that made them feel less human was when they had to be naked. “For us it meant true equality: nakedness” (35). Since their all naked there are no differences from each other. From coming a normal person who had never been treated like this or even seen hundreds of dead bodies. The Nazis were turning the poor people into animals without even knowing.
The holocaust was a terrible nightmare that became true to many different types of people. Their lives where changed from one day to the other. The monsters of the holocaust where Hitler with his army of Nazis who made everyone who was not “perfect” fell less than human. They made everyone’s experience unforgettable.