Elie Wiesel Dehumanization In Night

Dehumanization Through Elie Wiesel
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
“How old he had grown since the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.”(Wiesel 79) Chlomo -Wiesel’s father -changed emotionally and physically. He was put through incredible labor along with other prisoners and started to forget why it was important to survive. “‘I can’t go on.… This is the end…. I’m going to die here….’”(Wiesel
When Wiesel first met Moshe the Beadle, he would chant and sing. He was a poor man who made people feel comfortable around him. “...my fellow townspeople, though they would help the poor,were not particularly fond of them. Moshe the Beadle was the exception.”(Wiesel 1) He was deported to polish territory that had been taken over by a secret police group. He escaped back to Sighet after being wounded and taken for dead to tell everyone what happened there. “..... he went from one Jewish house to another,telling the story of Malka, the young girl who had taken three days to die, and of Tobias ….who had begged to be killed before his sons….”(Wiesel 4) Moshe the Beadle desperately tried to warn the Jewish people their fate but they chose to ignore and pity him. “Moshe had changed.There was no longer any joy in his eyes. He no longer sang. He no longer talked to me of God or of the cabbala ….People refused not only to believe his stories, but even to listen to them.”(Wiesel 4) His exposure to the criminal acts of his oppressors changed his whole personality. All he cared about was protecting the other Jews from experiencing the same things he did. Upon analysis of Night, Elie Wiesel’s use of characterization and conflict in the memoir helps to illustrate how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and