Holocaust Artifact

  This is an image taken from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, these are shoes taken from the prisoners of concentration camps. Shoes were one of the many personal belongings that were taken in order to the overall degradation of the Jewish people during the holocaust. I feel that this image connects to Night directly because of the fact that this did happen to Elie and his family. Also this image connects to one of the overall themes of Night, which is dehumanization. On page 24 Elie says "the world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car." He uses this quote to show the Jewish peoples sense of fear, these people were suffocating mentally and physically, they were cramped and scared and not told anything. This picture also shows us the sense of the sheer number of people that were taken. The people that had there shoes taken had all of their other personal belongings and their dignity to demean European Jews. All of these shoes have a person connected to them and a story connected to them, which shoes how cruel and disgusting the Nazi's were to the Jewish people.