Night by Elie Weisel

Night

Have you ever been dehumanized? In Elie Weisel's novel, Night, he writes about his experience in the concentration camps. In many situations, the Jews were dehumanized and treated like dogs and slaves. The Nazis would throw small pieces of food at the Jews and watch them fight over it. Jews had lost their feelings and conscious. They did not care if something was good or bad they only cared for themselves. Nazis tattooed numbers into the skin of the Jewish prisoners, taking away their names, the last thing they owned. The Nazis dehumanized the Jews by taking away their manes, starving them, and making them accustomed to the sight and smell of death.

One of the first things the Nazis did was tattoo numbers into the arms of the Jewish prisoners. By doing this, they took the last thing the Jews had that was truly theirs. The numbers made it easier for the Nazis to kill the Jews. Numbers stole their humanity, made them seem like an object, not a person. "The three 'veteran' prisoners, needles in hand, tattooed numbers on our left arm. I became A-7713."(Page) Nazis were able to mass murder the Jews because they were not human to them.

Germans taunted the Jews with little food and laughed at their fighting. Later in the book Weisel tells a story about a time on the train car when Germans would throw little scraps of bread into the cars. They would laugh at the Jews as they ran over each other and killed each other for the scraps. "One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest."(Page 100) They were treated like dogs because of something as simple as their religion.

After only days in the concentration camps, the Jews had to get used to the smell and sight of death. It surrounded them in the air and was seen in piles. Dead bodies were burned, thrown into holes in the dirt, or just left to rot on the ground. Young Elie had not seen such a thing before. He had to either watch or turn the other cheek. He writes, "And yet I was still thousands of miles away from imagining that these children were destined to feed the gas chambers and crematoria."(Page) Jews had become immune to death, which made them less of a human.

In conclusion, Nazis dehumanized the Jews to kill them easier. If it had not been for Elie's father, Elie would have become coldhearted as well. He took care as father and cared for him while other sons let their father die in the road.