In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, this passage powerfully characterizes the Jewish prisoners as zoo animals by the German bystanders. The later anecdote of Wiesel’s experience in Aden further demonstrates the dehumanization and animalization of people who are struggling by those who are more privileged and wealthy in society.
Wiesel describes his journey of evacuating Buna, one of the Nazi concentration camps in Poland, and packed into a train car with one hundred other prisoners, without any food or water. As they travel further into Germany, Wiesel recalls an instance when “a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon” (100). The situation parallels a person feeding crumbs to pigeons or ducks, characterizing the
