When Elie says “That is what concentration camp life had made of me”, this shows how he’s been beaten down to the core. At the beginning of the novel, Elie was EXTREMELY religious and would do anything for god. But when he goes to the camps, he slowly starts losing his faith, up to the point where he’s given into it. When he watched his father get beaten up by Idek, he couldn’t do anything. Because if he had intervened, he would have been beaten up as well, or it could have been even worse. When Elie goes to the camps, his environment and situation start to take over him.
Up until the point where he has no hope or faith left. In the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, we follow an 8 year old boy named Bruno who’s growing up during the Nazi regime. His father is a higher up in the Nazi military, and is fed bad information about jewish people. But when they move to the countryside, Bruno meets a young boy named Shmuel who’s in the camp. Bruno and Shmuel start to talk and become close friends. Throughout the movie, Bruno helps Shmuel in different ways, whether that being through food, games or ect. Bruno always lends a hand to Shmuel.
But at the end of the movie, Shmuel says that his father has been missing for a while, and asks Bruno to help. Bruno says yes, and goes into the camp to help find his father, but is then sent to the gas chambers and killed. When looking at this, we must ask ourselves, why did Bruno help Shmuel with this? Well, one reason could be that Shmuel was the only other boy around. With Bruno, he didn’t have anyone else who was his age, and so that makes Bruno and Shmuel draw towards one another. Another reason could be that Bruno takes pity on him. Before, Bruno lied to a Nazi solider which caused Shmuel to get beaten.
Bruno could have felt bad about this and want to help Shmuel. Since Shmuel was the only other young boy around, and since Bruno took pity upon him. We can see why Bruno tried to help Shmuel throughout the movie, and try to help find his father. With the Nazis and the Jews, the Nazis tried to dehumanize them as much as they could. By calling them rats, people all around were against them, and by referring them as “things” rather than people, this broke their spirits. In the book Night, the Nazis abused and mistreated the Jews as if they weren’t even beings or human.
Three examples of how Jews were dehumanized was 1. By luring them in, 2. How they got their “food”, and 3. How they were treated within the camps. When Elie was living in Hungary and before he was sent to the concentration camps. Nazis came into their town and surprisingly didn’t do anything bad….. at first. When the Nazis arrived, they treated the Jews kindly at first. They complimented them and they gave them flowers, chocolate, and etc. The people of Hungary were able to trust the Nazis and had thought that they wouldn’t do anything harmful. But were soon founded to be wrong.
The Nazis told the Jews to get into cars and sent them to the concentration camps. The Jews were fine with it at first, seeing how the Germans treated them before, they thought they were fine. But then, reality slowly started to sink in, and they all realized what their fate was going to be. When they headed to the camps Elie realized that they were lured and tricked into trusting them. Just like a mouse trap, the Naizs lured the Jews into trusting them, and then viciously attacked them. The Nazis tricking the Jews is the first example of how the Nazis dehumanized Elie and his people.
Later in the novel, Elie was moved to several camps on carts, and was given hardly any food whatsoever. They were starved in the camps and on the way to the camps. They were given scraps of bread or cold soup. They were given “food” that they couldn’t quench on, leaving them hungry and thirsty for more food. During one of their trips to another camp, there was a crumb of bread on the floor, and people freaked out. They attack each other in an animalistic nature, devoid of any emotion except pure rage and instinct.
When the Nazis gave the Jews little to no food, they caused them to fight against each other. Even though it was a small fraction of food, it caused people to go wild. Food is a major necessity that every human needs to have. And when you take away that necessity, people will kill each other to obtain it. Even if it is a limited amount of food, people will still fight with each other to eat it. With even just a tiny morsel of food, the Jews were easily able to turn against one another, showing us the second example of how the Nazis dehumanized the Jews.
When Elie got to the camps, that’s when Elie and his fellow Jews were mistreated the worst. When Elie and the Jews entered the camps, they weren’t treated like human beings. They were beaten with no sympathy or pity whatsoever. When a soldier relentlessly beats Elie’s father, Elie has no other choice but to watch. The goal of Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic policies was to dehumanize and then destroy the Jewish people. In the concentration camps, the Jews were treated worse than animals. This type of treatment caused some prisoners to give up their humanity in order to raise their own chances of survival.
On his very first night at Auschwitz, Elie is subjected to a fierce beating by other inmates. “Dozens of inmates,” Wiesel writes, “were there to receive us, sticks in hand, striking anywhere, anyone, without reason. ” Though not specifically stated, one can assume that these men are kapos, prisoners that the Nazis chose to keep other prisoners under control. Though they are also Jewish, the few benefits given to kapos are enough to make them turn on their fellow Jews. The way the Jews were treated in the camps is the third reason how they were dehumanized during the Holocaust.
