The terrible event of the Holocaust consisted of many Jews being seen and treated as less than a person, all because of their beliefs. Dehumanization is a key theme in Eliezer Wiesel’s book, Night, where he recounts his experience with his father in the concentration camps created by the Nazis. Throughout the book, Elie not only loses faith in God, but he loses faith in humanity as well. The Nazis stripped the Jews of their qualities that made them human; while regularly starving the Jews, slaughtering them without a reason, and often treating them like objects.
One of the many ways that the Jews are robbed of their humanity was being put in extreme starvation. On A Sunday at 10 AM, Eleizer describes a sudden alarm going off to warn the camp about a potential bombing. Of course, the Germans were only worried about themselves so they took cover in the shelters, and left the Jewish prisoners unsupervised in the streets of a Buna. He turns his head to see, “Two cauldrons of soup with no one to guard them!… Supreme temptation! Hundreds of eyes were looking at them, shining with desire. Two lambs with hundreds of wolves lying in wait for them. Two lambs without a shepherd, free for the taking. But who would dare? Fear was greater than hunger.” (Wiesel 59). The prisoners soon felt an urge to take some of the soup, but their “fear was greater than hunger”. It was as if the SS officers were teasing the Jews, they treated the Jews as animals. The concept of the Jews being treated as animals is especially proven when Elie compares the two cauldrons of soup and the Jews to “Two lambs with hundreds of wolves lying in wait for them.” For the Germans to go as far as refusing to honor the Jew’s right to eat, a basic human necessity, shows how much the Jews were treated as animals.
Another way the Jews were dehumanized was being killed without a justification to do so.
Elie and his family had just gotten off the train at Auschwitz, and the SS officers were shouting at them to go to the left or to the right, based on their gender. Him and his father were separated from his mom and three sisters. A fellow inmate told Elie and his father to lie about their age, their age would determine their fate, to work or to survive. Elie told the guard he was 18 and his father took the guard when he was 40, because they lied they were able to stay in the same group with each other. After they were forced to get rid of their clothes, shave their hair off, and shower in disinfectant, they were given a speech. The guard told them, “you are in Auschwitz, and Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney. The crematorium.” (Wiesel 38). The forced labor that the SS officers put upon the Jews was already slowly killing them. (Still need to complete Analysis and Conclusion Sentence)
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Although dehumanization affected Jews physically it also affected them psychologically, because they were tricked into thinking that they meant nothing more than an object. During their first day in the concentration camp, Elie and his inmates were ordered to clear the barracks so they could be cleaned. The officers gave the Jews new clothes, some coffee, and a thick bowl of soup. Elie began to believe that the concentration camp was not so bad, and the only thing he would have to worry about was the amount of work they would have to do for the Germans. His mindset began to change though when later in the day the Jews were ordered to line up. Three of the prisoners were at a table topped with medical instruments, and everyone else was told to roll up their left sleeves. As Elie had his number tattooed onto his left arm he believed that he, “became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name” (Wiesel 42). The German soldiers treated their prisoners like they weren’t worthy enough to be given respect. Once Elie was given his number, “A-7713”, his identity was taken away from him. No one at that camp cared about who he was before he arrived at the camp, so they certainly wouldn’t care about who he would be throughout his experience in the concentration camps. The SS officers convinced themselves that every Jew “had no other name”. Their hatred against Jews drove them to believe that because of their differences, the Jews were not worthy of being treated like normal human beings.
