Dehumanization In Elie Wiesel's "night"

565 Words3 Pages
In the book Night, Elie and his father are sent to a concentration camp called Auschwitz, and then Buna. At both of these camps, the Nazis were unfair to all of the Jews and treated them horribly. In other words, the Nazis "dehumanized" the Jews. Dehumanization is to treat people as if they are not human. To dehumanize a person is to be cruel to them until they no longer act human. In the book Night, the most disturbing form of dehumanization is that the Nazis barely fed the Jews. One way that the Nazis dehumanized the Jews is that they were forced to wear only thin, torn rags, and old shoes, To the Jews, "this was the true equality: nakedness. Shivering with cold" (32). They were being dehumanized because the fact that they only had this very thin outfit to wear was making them weaker and weaker, They had to wear this outfit year-round, and never got a new one. They even went through the cold, hard winter wearing just these rags. They also only had one pair of old shoes, which were sometimes too thin to wear anyway. Many people just remained barefoot, even in the snow. Not only were they just allowed to wear rags, but they were also forced to work while wearing just these rags. The Nazis made the Jews work hard, and treated them almost as slaves. The Nazis made them run a lot, as fast and as far as they could. They were also forced to march a lot, and were not allowed to stop even for a few seconds. The Nazis also put the Jews to work, and made them do some dreadful jobs. Some of them worked in warehouses, while some of them had to do even worse jobs. Some had to get rid of the dead bodies, which was probably disgusting and hard to watch. After working so hard all day, a few Jews were sometimes told that they were getting to take a "shower". This so-called "shower" was actually a gas chamber, where the Jews died a slow, painful death of suffocating. This was
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