Final answer:
Elie Wiesel's 'Night' describes the dehumanization of Jews in concentration camps who were stripped of their identities and subjected to unfathomable cruelty. The process served the Nazis' goal of facilitating the mass extermination known as the Holocaust. Jews were forced into ghettos, sent to camps mainly in Poland, and underwent starvation, disease, forced labor, and mass murder.
Step-by-step explanation:
In Night, Elie Wiesel provides a harrowing account of the dehumanization of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. From the moment Jews were transported to the camps, their personal identities were stripped away, starting with the confiscation of their possessions and continuing with the shaving of their heads, the exchanges of names for numbers, and the issuing of prison uniforms. This dehumanization served multiple purposes; primarily, it aimed to strip the prisoners of their humanity, making it psychologically easier for the perpetrators to carry out atrocities against them. It also created a hopeless, spirit-crushing environment where resistance seemed futile and survival uncertain.
Jews were taken from their homes and forced into ghettos before being sent to concentration and extermination camps. They were deprived of basic necessities such as adequate food, water, and shelter, subjected to brutal forced labor, and were victims of countless violent abuses. Conversely, they were given numbers in place of their names, prison garments, cramped living conditions, and an ever-present threat to their lives. These cruel actions were a part of the carefully orchestrated Final Solution, which was the planned extermination of the Jewish people.
The vast majority of the camps were located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The reasons for this were logistical, as Poland had the largest Jewish population in Europe at the time, and ideological, as the Nazis could operate with relatively little oversight. The consequences were devastating, with millions losing their lives in places specifically constructed for industrial-scale murder. Among the six prominent extermination camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau became the most notorious symbol of the Holocaust's barbarism.