Night Essay

Christine Bays
Mrs. Bosch
Honors English 10P
8 January 2008
Dehumanization of the Jews
In the 1940s, the Nazis took control over the Jews and put them in concentration camps. Little by little the Nazis dehumanized the Jews until they were just things that didn’t mean anything. Towns were turned into ghettos, families were split up; mothers and daughters were separated from their brothers and fathers. The Jew’s freedom was taken away. The Nazis told them what they had to do for work, what they could eat, and if they would live or die. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author and protagonist of the book, has to live through all the pain and hardship of the concentration camps, and he’s only 15 years old. Wiesel moved from concentration camp to concentration camp, and the different things that he had went through dehumanized him until all he had left to live for was hope. Wiesel was luckier than most, part of the hope that he had had been his father’s support encouraging him to keep living. It may have given them some strength, but Wiesel’s first day that he spent in a concentration camp was a day he would never forget.
Wiesel had just gotten off a train and was walking into his first concentration camp. One of the first things he experienced (observed) was a huge fire and the smell of burning flesh, and when he got close enough to see it, he could see that people were in the midst of the fire. “Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes I saw it with my own eyes…those children in the flames” (Wiesel 30). After seeing such cruelty and what could happen to him, he didn’t really want to live anymore. He didn’t want to go through the torturer of seeing people disappear one at a time and knowing where they would end up. He lost his faith in God. “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust” (Wiesel 32). He didn’t understand how humans could be killed and nobody seemed to be concerned. Living in the concentration camps he realized that to the Nazis he was just another thing that was disposable worry about, not a person, more like trash.
The concentration camps were the Jews whole lives when the Nazis took over. While they were in the concentration camps, a German soldier was always watching them and checking on their work, telling them what to do and when to do it. At the concentration camps, nothing belonged to the prisoners unless it was secretly hidden away. “From this moment, you come under the authority of the German army. Those of you who still have gold, silver or watches in your possession must give them up now. Anyone who is later found to have kept anything will be shot on the spot” (Wiesel 21). The Nazis controlled if you lived or died, where you worked, what you worked on, they even took away the Jew’s freedom. The Jews were like slaves, they didn’t have a life or their own. They even told the Jews what to say, “‘Here, kid, how old are you?’ ‘I’m not quite fifteen yet.’ ‘No. Eighteen.’ ‘But I’m not.’ ‘Fool. Listen to what I say’ He questioned my father, who replied: ‘Fifty.’ ‘No, not fifty. Forty. Do you understand? Eighteen and forty’” (Wiesel 28). The Nazis were taking control of the Jews lives, they were making them become what they wanted them to become and do what they wanted them to do. Wiesel in the book also states how the camps were making him less humane, “He began to beat [my father] with an iron bar. I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking of how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. What is more, any anger I felt at that moment was directed, not against the Kapo, but against my father. I was angry with him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek’s outbreak. That is what concentration camp life had made of me” (Wiesel 52). Being in a concentration camp so long had made him forget his morals and how to feel towards others. It had made him into a monster, but he realizes this and starts to undo it. When running or marching from camp to camp though, he still has to think of himself and how to survive.
When the Nazis needed to get the Jews from one camp to another or from the camp to where they worked, they would have them either march or run, depending on the situation or the weather. The Jews didn’t have a choice if they wanted to march or not, they had to obey the orders given by the Nazis. It didn’t matter if the day was hot or cold, the Nazis would make them march. Even when they were marching they could mess up by getting out of beat, and they would get punished for it. Whenever they marched, they had to march in time. “The band played a military march, always the same one. Dozens of units left for the workyards, in step. “The Kapos beat time: ‘Left, right, left, right.’ We left the camp without music, but in step: we still had the sound of the march in our ears. ‘Left, right! Left, right!’” (Wiesel 47). They must have had to listen to the music for a long time to have it stuck in their heads. Sometimes they wouldn’t have to march for very long, other times they would. When they wanted you to run, you ran, it didn’t matter if you stepped on anything. “Supporting me with his arm, he led me outside. It was far from easy. It was as difficult to go out as to get in. Under our feet were men crushed, trampled underfoot, dying. No one paid any attention” (Wiesel 84). The concentration camps had brainwashed them to where they didn’t even care when someone was dying and they were being stepped on. When they were told to move, they moved no matter what. When the Jews had to run in the snow to get to a new concentration camp, if they had to stop, they either fell behind and got shot by the Nazis, or they got crushed by the other Jews that were running with them. They didn’t have much to live for anymore, so they only did things to keep themselves alive. They lived only for themselves, unless they still cared for their father or son. Self-preservation was the main idea that they thought of.
When the Nazis took control of the Jews, there were so many horrible experiences that the Jews had, and none were good. The horrors and the atrocities of the Nazi behavior towards the Jews were just part of the dehumanization process that the Nazis used. More specifically, the dehumanized them by giving them a lack of possessions, forced them to watch and decide for self-preservation, and treated them like animals. The reason that the Jews had not fought back in the beginning is because they didn’t think that that someone could do the things that the Nazis ended up doing to them. The Jews didn’t think it could get any worse and it kept getting worse, so in the end they had to live with it or die. In choosing to live, it showed, that they had a thread of hope to hold on to. In the end, “the majority of Romanian Jews survived the war, although they were subject to a wide range of harsh conditions, including forced labor, financial penalties, and discriminatory laws” (“History of the Jews in Romania”). People must ask, if it is acceptable to stand by and allow the elevation of people to rule on top of the dead, maimed, abused and burned bodies of others?