Breeden 1 Rebekah Breeden Professor Ehrhardt HIST 1623-099 11 May 2012 Night Essay Elie Wiesel portrays the degradation of Jewish humanity and culture by describing his experiences during the Holocaust in World War II. Wiesel describes how the SS dehumanized the Jews through cruel treatment for various reasons. From the experiences described by Wiesel, the humanity of he himself and other inmates diminished as they looked out for themselves and not for family. Wiesel’s account shows that the human’s capacity for cruelty and strength is unparalleled. His account also shows that the reason we must remember the Holocaust is so that the mass genocide will not be forgotten, lest we commit the crime of injustice by forgetting who died.
Night by Elie Wiesel is a story based on his personal experiences during the holocaust controlled by the Nazi army in the concentration camps. Towards the end of 1941 all the Jewish people were taken away from their homes by the Nazi army. When they arrived in Auschwitz they Nazi army separated families by their strength, weakness, and gender. All the men and the women were separated. Then the weak and old ones were separated from the young and strong.
The Nazis were so unforgiving and cruel in their ways that Jews and Minorities had to find new ways of living without becoming known to the Nazis and the German public. This prompted many to go into hiding yet for many this was to no avail as they were discovered and shipped off to concentration camps where they were forced to perform manual labor, and death camps where they were mass murdered. Adolf Hitler came into power January 30,1933 after being appointed chancellor, soon after he seized
The process in which the Jews were rounded up concentrated, enslaved and eventually murdered was cruel and disgusting. After a Jewish person had spent a certain amount of time in slave work they were sent to death camps. A factory process of murder was something no one could fathom, being placed in an assembly line manor through a process that, in the end would terminate your life. This was something that the German government decided was best, to be a Jew and know that the government that runs the state you’re in by default or by occupation, has decided you are worthless and needed to be exterminated is not moral. To hate a person or people so much that murdering them in cold blood by the bulk, just seems morally right is genocide.
Jammed into the cattle car with Eliezer and his father was a woman named Mrs. Schächter. She and her son were also being sent to a concentration camp. All of a sudden, she started screaming to the others that she saw a fire after they arrived at Auschwitz. After the first couple times she did this, two of the strongest men in the car hit her until she become silent. This was an extreme form of dehumanization.
Despite the Jews' belief that Nazis wouldn't be able to come near the capital city, Budapest, the Germans soon move into Sighet. Jews are forced to turn in all valuables, and everything they owned. Eventually, the Jews are confined to small ghettos, crowded together into narrow streets behind barbed-wire fences. Jews remaining in Sighet were thrown into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. On the third night in the cattle cars, Madame Schächter, a middle-aged woman who is on the train with her ten-year-old son begins to scream that she sees fire outside the window.
In Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood by Nechama Tec, there are many discriminative, stereotypical and prejudice events that take place throughout the book. The book is actually memoirs written by the author about how during World War II Nazis would raid villages to imprison and/or kill Jews and show what the Jews had to do to survive. The Nazis hated the Jews; they had unfavorable opinions about them, and were taught to treat them unfairly. They stereotyped the Jews as if all of them were bad and deserved to be punished. An event takes a big toll on the main character (Tec); when the Nazis separated her family.
Hitler had written a book called “Mein Kampf” (My Struggle) while serving time in prison. In Mein Kampf, Hitler blamed everything on the Jews. So in 1919, he began to gain popularity from few, but by the 1930’s he had somehow gotten thousands of people to listen to his every word which also included his feeling of extreme hatred towards the Jews. Anti- Semitism means prejudice against and hatred for the Jews. It was quite clear that Hitler had a severe hatred for the Jews, but he wasn’t alone.
Soviet Union leader Stalin is deporting people he believes to be anti-Soviet sending to prison war camps, forcing them into slavery, and/or to be murdered. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, military servicemen, writers, business owners, musicians, artists, and also librarians were all considered enemies and were added to the list for complete genocide or extermination in other words. The first deportations took place on June 14, 1941. In the meantime the USSR wiped out Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia from the map during Stalin’s reign. Between the Soviet and Nazi forces these countries did not exist during the period of the Genocide.
Concentration camps held Jews as well as criminals, political prisoners, gypsies, etcetera. Like the ghettos, concentration camps held the Jews and had terrible living conditions. At the camps the first thing the SS would do was take the prisoners clothing, shave their heads, and replace their name with a number (dehumanizing them). Prisoners of the camps were forced to work for the Germans, including putting people inside the gas chambers, removing the remains from the gas chambers and sorting through previously (Jewish) owned clothes that would be sent to German residents. Prisoners who were thought to be “unfit” for work (the weak, the ill, prisoners with a mental condition, etcetera) were brought to the gas chambers.