Inhumane Treatment In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Jewish prisoners were treated like animals to the point where they acted like animals. The prisoners of the camp were beaten and worked to death; they knew nothing else but this inhumane treatment inflicted upon them and Eliezer forgot to see himself as a person, “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Wiesel, 50).
People in class may criticize Eliezer’s feelings of annoyance towards his father and seeing him like a burden at points in the novel, but it was nearly impossible to survive with the same amount of compassion and sympathy associated with personhood. Death and punishment was as expected as waking up in the morning, and those who survived were not convinced

that they were human anymore. The power that the Nazis had over them, as the people who were supposed to be protecting the nation and everyone in it, was enough to break their spirits and rewire their everyday behaviors and attitudes. If they were still in Sighet, Eliezer would not have gone to bed hearing his father’s cries for help—he had respect for Shlomo as both a leader and a father. However, when Auschwitz has become the reality, it changes how people see the entire world. He had become what he needed to stay alive; in that experience, a person would never survive Auschwitz. Human nature is not thick enough to survive something as crippling as Auschwitz. Therefore, Eliezer had to become superhuman; even when he was liberated, he did not see himself as a person. He says, “From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me" (Wiesel, 109). After the experience, he may have been accepted back into society, but part of him did not accept himself as a person in his own society.
In the example of Night, the people in power were determining who was worth being accepted by society and who was deemed inhuman; after the Russian Revolution, Stalin set up Gulags in order to punish who he deemed undesirable to his society, as well. These forced-labor camps were created in order to punish criminals, committing crimes from petty stealing to homicide. In this system, all criminals were treated the same because they all acted outside the jurisdictions of acceptable behaviors and thus lost their right to participate in their society as people. They were now prisoners, susceptible to cruel and unjust punishments because they were already stripped of their personhood. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a prisoner for eight years, wrote A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to show that the system can affect anybody; Ivan was a common man in Soviet Russia who was deemed a criminal and imprisoned for ten years after he was accused of becoming a spy after being a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. He was innocent, but had no right to object because he was a prisoner and not a person entitled to human rights.
The cruel punishment by the zeks is similar to the guards in Night, and Ivan had become desensitized to the harsh conditions.

Similar to Night, one must internalize human nature and take on the treatment as a creature as opposed to a person. They were controlled by the zeks, and it was up to the prisoners to survive how they could. Unfavorable, Fetiukov survived camp acting not like a human, but like a rat. Shukov describes him as, “the sort who when he was looking after someone else’s bowl took the potatoes from it” (Solzhenitsyn, 10). He relied on the pity of others to obtain food and tobacco throughout the novel, and he survives because he has willingly given up his personhood. The other prisoners, especially Shukov, saw him as having no dignity—something Shukov strived to hold onto. However, the treatment has stripped him of his personhood in his loss of compassion, similar to how Eliezer saw his father. Shukov expressed apathy towards the loss of his family. He said, “There was little sense in writing. Writing now was like dropping stones in some deep, bottomless pool. They drop; they sink—but there is no answer” (Solzhenitsyn, 18). He was no longer a person himself, but was cold and stoic like a rock. The reader does not have a comparison of what Shukov was like before being imprisoned like in Night, but it can assumed that the harsh conditions have caused Shukov to become more reserved and apathetic to his situation, as trauma often

does.
Trauma changes how a person lives, regardless if they preserve their right to personhood. Recently, the development of “rape culture” has made it increasingly difficult for rape victims to access the help needed to move on and preserve their personhood. Often, rape victims are met with either a lack of access to care or insufficient care from community resources—people who are supposed to support and protect their community. Campbell and Raja conducted a study in order to determine how mental health professionals view the effectiveness of care rape victims receive from community resources such as law enforcement, hospital care, and legal advice; they discuss the phenomenon of secondary victimization when rape victims are not given the care they need, “the unresponsive treatment rape victims receive from social system personnel. It is the victim-blaming behaviors and practices engaged in by community service providers, which further the rape event, resulting in additional stress and trauma for victims” (Campbell and Raja, 262). This frequently results in the person being labelled as “victim” and facing a world of disbelief and stigma. The consequences of reaching out for help are often more emotionally scarring than the sexual violence itself, making the “victim” feel rejected by the community that is supposed to help them recover.
When victims reach out for community professionals to help them, they usually obtain minimal support, “Police and prosecutors are preoccupied with "case wins," so only the rape cases they perceive as likely convictions are actually prosecuted. Hospital staff are focused on processing patients quickly, so rape victims receive, at best, bare minimum services. In such an unresponsive model of case processing, victims are often blamed for the assault and denied help, which further traumatizes survivors and slows recovery” (Campbell and Raja, 262). Campbell and Raja administered a questionnaire to 14,119 providers and asked questions about the kind of care rape victims receive and how it affects them. The results showed that 86% of mental health professionals licensed in Illinois agreed that “the behavior of the community professionals can further traumatize rape victims” and only 40% agreed “community professionals do a good job helping rape victims” (Campbell and Raja, 268). Victims are afraid to come forward and ask for help because, like history explains to us, people will strip one’s personhood and label someone as something detached from the idea of personhood. They are no longer an individual capable of participating in society—they are only susceptible to the treatment administered to them by the actual people in society who makes the rules of what is acceptable.
In every example, there is a distinct group of people deemed by the rest of society as unequal and ultimately subpar to human; they are then rejected by society and stripped of their personhood, forced to live while knowing they will never be treated as fairly as others around them. Each group of people lived through different experiences and different levels of pain and suffering, experiences that cannot be compared. However, they are connected by the rejection and alienation by their society. Women have been treated as objects throughout history’s entirety, only being valued for their beauty and services to men. Jewish people have been persecuted for their identity and had their personhood stripped from them multiple times, throughout history as well. Prisoners have always been treated as slaves, their feelings and opinions suddenly meaningless. Finally, rape victims have been disbelieved and silenced throughout history, even in a world as innovative as today’s. Like the groups of people before them, they are finding their voice in order to reclaim their personhood and obtain the resources they need to rejoin the society they once had at their fingertips.