Chandler Allen-The Systematic Destruction of One's Humanity

In Elie Wisel's novel, the reader is given the perspective of being uprooted from a homeland and being sent to a concentration camp. Wiesel's intimate description of this process renders the experience of being in such a situation unmitigatedly; taking pains to convey each part of his journey in vivid detail. The system employed by the Germans to extract every Jew from their native land and then move them to sequestered death camps is appalling in it's efficiency and effectiveness. The critical object of such a large-scale operation was more than just the movement and slaying of the Jews, it was a process of stripping them of all comforts and familiarities of human life, so that they would come to yearn for death long before it would be given to them. In reading the novel, I took particular notice of how frequent attitudes shifted from optimism to despair then back to optimism at the first sign of promise. An individual in this situation befalls all manner of disorienting shifts of mood that would not regularly seize them in typical life.

The atmosphere of the concentration camp was designed to eliminate one's certainty of anything, to make one constantly vulnerable to the harshness of sudden change. Unable to predict or expect anything about one's situation, in addition to being deprived of any information before arriving to the camp, keeps the captive in a permanent state of disarray. This method was used be the Germans to ensure a much slimmer chance of revolt or resistance from the prisoners while they systematically killed them. If the Germans were to try and kill the prisoners in bulk, it would instill the unquestionable realization that they were being killed, hunted even, by their oppressors. It would be inefficient on the part of the German's agenda to allow such a realization to be fixated in the minds of their prisoners, for such certainty might cause the prisoners to discard any resignations about being gunned down while revolting. No, instead of immediate execution by gunshot or explosive or the like, the Germans relied on economically efficient, psychologically caustic, means of mass execution.