In reaction to the book Night by Elie Wiesel I can truly say that I am shocked and appalled by the fact that the Nazi guards got away with committing such atrocities to their Jewish prisoners such as what they did in this book. In the book the Nazi guards dehumanized their Jewish prisoners by both taking away their rights as human beings, and by treating them like animals.
In the book Elie Wiesel writes (p.24), "There are 80 of you in the car, the German officer added, if any one of you goes missing, you will all be shot like dogs." In this quote Elie Wiesel shows just how ruthless the Germans could be in their task of deporting the Jews, it also shows just how cruel the Germans were to their prisoners, they packed them into cattle cars 80 at a time and referred to them as "dogs". In referring to the Jews as dogs the Germans dehumanized the Jews by not treating them as human, but as animals.
Another passage where we see dehumanization was when on p. 37 Elie Wiesel writes on how the first concentration camp changed the prisoners, "In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men." This quote shows just how bad the Jews were treated at the first camp they arrived to. After arrival they were sorted, stripped, and forced to run from barrack to barrack, after this process had been going on a wile Wiesel writes that they had "ceased to be men". This is just one of the many ways that the Germans dehumanized the Jews in this book. This passage shows dehumanization because the Germans took away the prisoners human qualities, the Jews were forced to run like animals under the Germans control.
In another quote Elie Wiesel describes their German tent leader, (p.48) "Our tent leader was a German. An assassin's face, fleshy lips, and hands that resembled a wolf's paws." This quote is describing how the dehumanization affected both the Jews and the Germans. In the quote the leader of the tent in Buna is described with an assassin's face and hands like a wolf this could mean that he is both deadly like a wolf or an assassin, this is an example of how dehumanization affected the guards, in an earlier quote (p.28) the guards surrounded the prisoners "like wolves".
