Racism is a foundation that was built merely on ethnic background, which continues to be a talking point today. The memoirs Farewell to Manzanar by Wakatsuki Houston & Houtson (1973) and Night by Elie Wiesel (1958) both take place during the Second World War. Farewell to Manzanar follows a young Jeanne Wakatsuki, a Japanese who was incarcerated at the Manzanar Incarceration camp, and Night follows a young Elie Wiesel, who is transferred between the Nazi death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald. Racism is the discrimination of another person based on their ethnic background and is heavily based on institutionalized discrimination between each other, interpersonal hostility between communities, and propaganda that has been spread during …show more content…
Elie Wiesel, author of the book Night, wrote about his experience of the evolving discrimination towards the Jewish community: "But new edicts were already being issued. We no longer had the right to frequent restaurants or cafes, to travel by rail, to attend synagogues, to be on the streets after six o'clock in the evening. Then came the ghettos" (Wiesel, 1958, 11). While the German soldiers occupied the town, they forced all the Jewish citizens into ghettos, where they were to wait until they were taken off to the concentration camps. Not only were they forced into the ghettos, but they were also deprived of attending their religious services, given a curfew, and given bans on where they could go in their free time. The evolving discrimination shown is no more than pure evil, restricting someone due to their ethnic background. When restricted from something simply because of ethnicity, people are revoked of their human rights. This causes an imbalance in power and can cause tension between groups. In the memoir Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, a perspective on discrimination in the United States is written when she was in the sixth grade, and she writes that "I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred. Rather, I would be seen as someone foreign, or as someone other than American, or perhaps not be seen at all" (Wakatsuki Houston & Houston, 1973, …show more content…
Another quote from Wakatsuki Houston gives a look into the experience of overt hostility based on ethnic identity. "She would have nothing to do with me...This was the first time I had felt outright hostility from a Caucasian" (Wakatsuki Houston & Houston, 1973, 12). This encounter of hers greatly belittles the reality of being rejected due to one simple thing: her ethnic background. This highlights the prejudices that made their way into American society during the Second World War. Whereas discrimination can be subtle, this is a direct act of interpersonal hostility, which has left a mark on individual self-worth and belonging. As for across the sea on the continent of Europe, Germany's Nazi Party was hard-set on hunting down the Jewish citizens of the world. Elie Wiesel, who experienced a direct encounter with the German Army, recalled a moment when a German officer said, "From this moment on, you are under the authority of the German Army" (Wiesel, 1958, 23–24). While it may seem like a simple statement, it goes further to capture the imposition of control by the Nazi Party. This statement was likely declared by nearly every German officer who went to the Jewish sects to round them up. By further symbolizing the idea that the living people were now under the authority, and soon to be ownership, of the German Army, it marked the moment where individual people were
The book Farewell to Manzanar takes place during World War II. Jeanne the daughter of Ko and Mama Wakatsuki, the writer of this nonfiction piece. She lived in the internment camp called Manzanar it was in the state of California. The book Night also takes place during World War II.Ellie the writer of this book lived to tell about his life in the Holocaust. While some differences between Night and Farewell to Manzanar are noticeable,the similarities are striking.
Mistakes in the World’s History World War II officially started on September 1, 1939, but what really pulled America into forceful action was when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. When Americans heard of the bombing, people panicked. Americans blamed everything on the Japanese and hated even the innocent Japanese-Americans for everything that happened. At this time, on the other side of the world, Hitler had already been overseeing concentration camps for Jews for eight years. The first concentration camps were in 1933, and millions of Jews were murdered and tortured mercilessly for no reason other than they were a race/ethnicity hated by Hitler.
The book, Night, by Eliezer (Elie) Wiesel, entails the story of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps all around Europe. Around the middle of the 20th century in the early 1940s, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi army traveled around Europe in an effort to exterminate the Jewish population. As they went to through different countries in order to enforce this policy, Nazi officers sent every Jewish person they found to a concentration camp. Often called death camps, the main purpose was to dispose of people through intense work hours and terrible living conditions. Wiesel writes about his journey from a normal, happy life to a horrifying environment surrounded by death in the Nazi concentration camps. Night is an amazingly
Elie Wiesel once said, “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” The book Night is a tragic story written by a holocaust survivor. It includes many of the things Jews endured in concentration camps, including the fact that many young women and children were burned in a crematorium simply because the Germans did not see them as fit enough to work. In Wiesel’s novel Night, Wiesel uses the motifs fear, silence, and optimism.
Night by Elie Wiesel was a memoir on one of the worst things to happen in human history, the Holocaust. A terrible time where the Nazi German empire started to take control of eastern Europe during WWII. This book tells of the terrible things that happened to the many Jewish people of that time. This time could easily change grown men, and just as easily a boy of 13. Elie’s relationship with God and his father have been changed forever thanks to the many atrocities committed at that time.
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
The author of the book Night , Elie Wiesel, explains his life, as well as his fellow Jews, as a young Jewish boy in concentration camps. The Jews who were sent to concentration camps were put under extremely harsh conditions and were treated like nothing but animals while under the control of the Germans. Wiesel illustrates a picture of these horrific events in his book NIght. He also describes the gruesome conditions the Jews were forced through while under the power of the Germans.
Night by Elie Wiesel displays the effect of how Nazis took away the Jews’ basic rights
In the novel Night, written by Eli Wiesel, shares traumatic events that occurred during the Holocaust. Night contains several significant events in which dehumanization is taking place. Dehumanization is the process by which the Nazis gradually reduced the Jews to feel they are worthless and meaningless to life. Jews were treated so poorly to the point they no were no longer looked at as humans.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book, Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald writes “He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized”. This idea of how people could become almost unimaginably cruel due to dehumanization corresponds with the Jews experience in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the ruthless massacre of Jewish people, and other people who were consider to be vermin to the predetermined Aryan race in the 1940s. One holocaust survivor and victim was Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize winner and author of Night. Wiesel was one of the countless people to go through the horrors of the concentration camps, which dehumanized people down to their animalistic nature, an echo of their previous selves. Dehumanization worsens over time in Night because of how the Jews treated each other, and how Elie changed physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Throughout the Nobel Peace Prize award winner Night, a common theme is established around dehumanization. Elie Wiesel, the author, writes of his self-account within the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Being notoriously famed for its unethical methods of punishment, and the concept of laboring Jews in order to follow a regime, was disgusting for the wide public due to the psychotic ideology behind the concept. In the Autobiography we are introduced to Wiesel who is a twelve year old child who formerly lived in the small village of Sighet, Romania. Wiesel and his family are taken by the Nazi aggressors to the Concentration camp Auschwitz were they are treated like dogs by the guards. Throughout the Autobiography the guards use their authoritative
Night by Elie Wiesel is a novelization of the struggles that were faced during the Holocaust. This novel is written to teach one that it is important to take action when injustice is seen. Wiesel uses first person point of view, imagery, and symbolism to display the ways one can be able to stand for what they believe in. He tells the reader how one impact the society they live in and that if no one takes action against injustice for the better then nothing will improve and society will not change. Wiesel says, “I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this” (Wiesel 39). He depicts that it should be difficult for humans to tolerate any injustice that they see. There are many current events going on around
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night.
The memoir Night by Elie Wiesel gives an in depth view of Nazi Concentration Camps. Growing up in the town of Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel, a young Jewish boy at the innocent age of 12, whose main focus in life was studying the Kabbalah and becoming closer in his relationship with God. In the memoir, Elie Wiesel reflects back to his stay within a Nazi Concentration Camp in hopes that by sharing his experiences, he could not only educate the world on the ugliness known as the Holocaust, but also to remind people that by remembering one atrocity, the next one can potentially be avoided. The holocaust was the persecution and murder of approximately six million Jew’s by Aldolf Hitler’s Nazi army between 1933 and 1945. Overall, the memoir shows