Night by Elie Wiesel Deception

Night by Elie Wiesel

Deception has been a long gone strategy used by Nazi Germany to trick the Jewish prisoners into camps to work hard and earn a chance to freedom. However, the history explains the treatment to be deceitful and brutal to those suffering inside the camps. Prisoners were never given the freedom that they longed for, a trick plotted to drain them with hard work on the camps so they could earn themselves a slowly breeding death in the form of freedom. The hopes of being selected to continue to work eventually leaded to deceitful perception that they will ever be forgiven by the militants. However, it never happened and prisoners at the camps were driven into gas chambers for forceful live cremation after they were declared unfit to work. The thesis statement for this paper supports the idea that Nazi Germany used deception as a mean to control the overflowing Jewish camp at Auschwitz II when it was constructed as a subsidiary of the main Auschwitz camp. Not only did this deception assisted the army in controlling the mass accumulation of Jews but also was a propaganda, a plot and an experiment to slowly and gradually exterminate the Jewish race by letting them starve and become obsolete with disease and weakness (Wiesel, 2008).

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Eliezer Wiesel is a man who enlightens the holocaust conducted in World War II with his personal experience where he survived the holocaust after spending years at the Auschwitz Birkenau working for the Nazi Germany at the camp. The Nazi propaganda was successful at the camps when they drove the prisoners to work hard by engraving a deceitful inscription at the entrance of Auschwitz Birkenau camp quoted, "work is freedom." This inscription served as a ray of hope for the innocent prisoners abducted from Sighet who had been living in deceitful perception that they are safe from the clutches of Nazis however their self-deception proved terribly wrong when Nazis invaded the place, abducted the Jews from Sighet, and moved them to Birkenau. In Eliezer Wiesel's Night, self-deception has also been given much credit for Jewish mass murders. Referring to self-deception, Wiesel quotes in his book Night as, "The Germans were already in town; the Fascists were already in power, the verdict was already out- and the Jews of Sighet were still smiling" (Wiesel, 1981, pg 20).

As for the deception used by Nazis, the irony behind the engraved inscription is bitter. They tricked prisoners into believing that the camp was a work camp and that there are chances for those to be freed who worked hard and cooperated well. With this purpose in mind, the prisoners were given a fixed proportion of meal just enough for them to survive and when they used up the energy produced from the meal they were unknowingly, gradually breeding a slow death with malnutrition and weakness. How the German army used this deception can be best quoted from Night when the Pole in charge of the block where Eliezer was kept with other men said, "Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Do not lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep your faith. We shall all see the day of liberation" (Wiesel, 1981, pg 5).

The work of these prisoners was to build the Auschwitz camp which was a method used by Nazis to kill Jews when they are overworked with weakness or caught diseases.

At another occasion, Wiesel quotes in Night, "we were quite used to this kind of rumor. It was not the first time that false prophets announced to us: peace in the wind, the Red Cross negotiating our liberation, or other fables. Moreover, often we believed them. It was like an injection of morphine" (Wiesel,1981, pg 80). Prisoners were given false hopes that Red Cross is progressing in trying to free Jewish prisoners from all the camps constructed by Nazis which unfortunately worked every time and prisoners ignited new energy and hope to work harder in the faith of getting freed.

Conclusion