Hunger and Humanity - Elie Wiesel's Night

...

with imagery, metaphors are also used in this excerpt. Wiesel calls the men fighting over the bread, "Beasts of prey,"(Wiesel, 101) and "animals," (Wiesel, 101). This diminishes the humanity in the Jews. The need to eat overpowered the Jews that they became bloodthirsty, vicious creatures.

The lack of hunger is also demonstrated in there primary source documents. One example, is called Between Witnesses and Testimony: Survivor Narratives and the Shoah. It is a testimony of a Jewish survivors while they were in the concentration camps. During the interview, a survivor, Leon W., states, "When you’re hungry, it gets to a point where you don’t mind stealing from your own sister, from your own father," (Shoah). This quote expresses the true horror that hunger did to people. It also has a little bit of irony, usually siblings do not rob each other and their parents of food. However, hunger has taken them over so much that they have lost their humanity. It turns them into monsters, viscous creatures who steal from their loved ones.

By using these differing rhetorical and literary devices, the authors of these books, documents, and movies are able to exhibit how hunger and the need for food dehumanized the Jews. The authors intelligently reveal how hunger took over the lives of the Jews. It turned them into animals, sub-human creatures, whose only need was to obtain and eat food. Likewise, the authors also demonstrate how hunger affected them emotionally. They lost all emotion. They wouldn’t mind stealing from a sibling or a parent. All in all, the Jews reveal how starvation can devour the humanity in people and make them do things they wouldn’t normally do.

Work Cited Page

Bernard-Donals, Michael, and Richard Glejzer. "Between Witness And Testimony: Survivor Narratives And The Shoah." College Literature 27.2 (2000): 1. Academic Search Premier. Web. 2 Nov. 2016.

The Pianist. Directed by Roman Polanski, performances by Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, and Ed Stoppard, Canal+ and Studio Canal, 2002.

Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill and Wang, 2006