The Effects of Being a Victim of Prejudice in the Book, Night by Elie Wiesel

How does being a victim of prejudice affect/change people? The short, biographical memoir Night details the struggle that author Elie Wiesel suffered during the Holocaust. The book explains the torture he fought from the armed SS men in the two concentration camps he was detained in. Among the torture, he sights the words said by the weak prisoners and by the strong guards and how each changes throughout the book. Being a victim of oppression and prejudice can change people by making them lose faith in their religion, life and also it can make them feel “inhuman.

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The first portion that I will talk about is how the victims lose their faith in religion. The first example of this comes in the first few pages when we see Moishe the Beadle taken away by the SS. Elie says “He [Moishe] was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He only spoke of what he had seen” (Wiesel 7).

Moishe had been tortured by the SS and shot and left to die. In the earlier pages, it is stated that Moishe is very religious and he was Elie’s “mentor” on all things religious. After he is taken by the Nazi’s, he no lopnger cares about God or religion or anything at all besides what he had seen. Elie notices this and see his change. Elie too has this same change during his time at the concentration camp. “The almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent.

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What was there to thank Him for?” (Wiesel 33). Elie has just witnessed families getting separated and the smoke from the crematorium go up and he is infuriated with God. He thinks that God does not care about them anymore and that he has just left them to die and suffer. He calls God terrible to show his defiance to the religion and how even a short amount of persecution can change someone.

Being a victim of persecution can make people want to kill themselves or make them feel very bad. One of the most common quotes in the book was “I can’t go on” (Wiesel 76). This line is a hyperbole because they can go on, it just feels like they can’t because of the limits that they had been pushed to. Another quote asks if all the prisoners can just be shot and left for dead. The hate that they have experience had pushed them to their life limit and they can no longer handle it. Another example of this is when Elie says “I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with death that he had already chosen” (Wiesel 105). This metaphor explains Elie’s dad’s choice of life or death and how Elie tries to get him back to wanting to live. His dad has been through a lot, being beaten, sick and almost being picked for selection. He chooses death because he is almost near dying and not in any condition to live. Oppression is making the prisoners feel dead inside and it makes them show it on the outside which rubs off on other prisoners, and this is what persecution can do to people. The final part of my essay will focus on the dehumanization aspect of persecution.

Dehumanization was prevalent all throughout this book, from name calling to bad rations to everything in between. The most basic example of dehumanization was when Elie says “I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time” (Wiesel 52). He is complaining about the lack of provisions given to him and other prisoners. He says that his stomach is like an hourglass; when it is empties he dies just a little bit. He uses a hyperbole to say that he is less than he really is. He also uses this to talk about soup that was left out during an air raid drill. He explains the eyes that looked at it; the hungry eyes that were looking at the soup like their prey.The major dehumanization change is that now all the prisoners think about is food and when they get their next meal. In conclusion, prejudice can affect certain people by making them lose their faith or making them feel suicidal. What the Nazi’s did was a great example of how people changed in this story. Everybody changed in a different way and that shows how the oppression affects everyone differently and how it can have different reactions from different people. The Nazi’s pushed every prisoner to their breaking point and this caused things that would not have happened otherwise. Finally, the oppression shows that every human is different and how different people handle different adverse conditions.