Night's Experiences And Dehumanization In Night By Elie Wiesel

Introduction

Author

The author of Night is Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor. The book is the story of his time in the camp, as he stayed in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp for most of his time. Elie Wiesel’s goal is to prevent anything like this from happening again. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He has other books as well focusing on Jews and his recovery from his experiences.

Title and Genre

The book, Night, is a story following a Jew living in Auschwitz during World War II. The book title is a metaphor for how the holocaust felt to him.

Context of Novel

The book starts in Romania following Elie’s family. The Germans having taken over most of Europe in World War II by the time they reached Romania in 1944. The

Eliezer also becomes aware of the cruelty of which he himself is capable. Everything he experiences in the war shows him how horribly people can treat one another—a revelation that troubles him deeply. The first insensible cruelty Eliezer experiences is that of the Nazis. Yet, when the Nazis first appear, they do not seem horrible in any way. The Jews’ first impression was that they were actually polite people. So many parts of the Holocaust are so crazy to believe, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is how human beings could so horrifically slaughter millions of innocent Jews. Elie shows how evil these people were by sharing stories of what they did to make the prisoners inhumane. Night also demonstrates that cruelty creates cruelty. Instead of comforting each other in times of difficulty, the prisoners respond to their situation by turning against one another. At one point, a Kapo tells Elie that every man must be for himself and care about no one else or he will be killed. It is significant that a Kapo makes this remark to the Elie, because Kapos themselves were prisoners placed in charge of other prisoners. They enjoyed a relatively better quality of life in the camp, but they helped the Nazis in achieving their goal and often behaved cruelly toward prisoners underneath them. At the beginning of the fifth chapter, Eliezer calls them “functionaries of death.” The Kapos’ position symbolizes the way the Holocaust’s cruelty created cruelty, turning people against each other, as surviving became the only