Inhumane Treatment In Night By Elie Wiesel

The Jewish prisoners were treated like animals to the point where they acted like animals. The prisoners of the camp were beaten and worked to death; they knew nothing else but this inhumane treatment inflicted upon them and Eliezer forgot to see himself as a person, “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Wiesel, 50).
People in class may criticize Eliezer’s feelings of annoyance towards his father and seeing him like a burden at points in the novel, but it was nearly impossible to survive with the same amount of compassion and sympathy associated with personhood. Death and punishment was as expected as waking up in the morning, and those who survived were not convinced

Similar to Night, one must internalize human nature and take on the treatment as a creature as opposed to a person. They were controlled by the zeks, and it was up to the prisoners to survive how they could. Unfavorable, Fetiukov survived camp acting not like a human, but like a rat. Shukov describes him as, “the sort who when he was looking after someone else’s bowl took the potatoes from it” (Solzhenitsyn, 10). He relied on the pity of others to obtain food and tobacco throughout the novel, and he survives because he has willingly given up his personhood. The other prisoners, especially Shukov, saw him as having no dignity—something Shukov strived to hold onto. However, the treatment has stripped him of his personhood in his loss of compassion, similar to how Eliezer saw his father. Shukov expressed apathy towards the loss of his family. He said, “There was little sense in writing. Writing now was like dropping stones in some deep, bottomless pool. They drop; they sink—but there is no answer” (Solzhenitsyn, 18). He was no longer a person himself, but was cold and stoic like a rock. The reader does not have a comparison of what Shukov was like before being imprisoned like in Night, but it can assumed that the harsh conditions have caused Shukov to become more reserved and apathetic to his situation, as trauma often