Mans Inhumanity

Over the centuries, nothing has caused more pain and suffering for man than man himself. Through war, hate crimes, and random acts of violence, the fear of the different and unknown has made itself known in human nature. The novel Night, the movie Schindler’s List and the article A Tortured Legacy are all examples of this. Through the suffering of the Jews at the hands of the Germans, there is no clearer example of man’s inhumanity to man. The holocaust was far more than a tragedy; it is something you simply cannot describe with words.

The sheer evil and hate that took place in the 1940’s really simplifies what man can be like when he’s at his weakest and lowest point of existence. Through the merciless slaughtering and torturing of the Jewish people, the Germans showed to the whole world what it’s like to be inhuman; to be an animal. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, Hitler’s main goal was to make the Jews feel inhuman; he was very successful in this. The Jews were tortured everyday for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own amusement. The SS officers treated the men as if they were animals, making them fight for food.

Women, babies, old, sick, and handicapped were put into the crematoriums as soon as they arrived at the camps. They killed people for no reason, with no remorse whatsoever. Torture, being treated like animals, and being burned alive or killed were all things that led to the Jews feeling as if they were not human. Torture played a very big part in the Jews feeling inhuman. The SS officers beat the Jews very often, many times for no reason. Eliezer talks about how “one day when Idek was venting his fury, I happened to cross his path.

He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me upagain, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood. ” (Wiesel 53). When his father was on the verge of dying he was calling out to Eliezer, he was told to shut up by one of the officers. He kept yelling, and then he was beat repeatedly for talking. He then fell unconscious and died soon after. Many people inside the camps were tortured very badly, and often. All of the Jews were treated like animals, which led to them feeling inhuman.

When on the cattle cars, they would pass through German towns. One time “ a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The workers watched the spectacle with great interest. ” (Wiesel 100). The conditions on the cattle cars were horrible. Sometimes one hundred people would be squeezed into one car like animals. When people would die inside the cattle cars they would throw them out of the cars, sometimes without even being…