Elie Wiesel’s Congo and Night. Literature & Language Essay

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Elie Wiesel’s Congo and Night
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July 5, 2018
Introduction
The history of mankind has always been fraught with ill treatment and violence of different groups of people towards each other. From the early beginnings of written records until today, plenty of these acts could be attributed to a society’s flawed perception of the differences that exist between groups of people. Differences that are usually delineated by lines religion, belief, ethnicity, and nationality, amongst others. More particularly, these violent actions that are caused by such perception is called Persecution. In turn, persecution in its most extreme form is called a Genocide, which is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group” CITATION Mernd2 \l 1033 (Merriam-Webster). In this article, acts of genocide against the Jews (Elie Wiesel’s Night) and those towards the Rwandans (Congo Civil War) would be compared using the Stages of Persecution. All in all, the author of this article strongly believes that while these events happened in a different time and context, certain similarities could be found between them.
Persecution and Genocide
During the Holocaust and the Congo Civil War, the Germans and the Hutu-powered groups has killed 6 million Jews and 800 thousand Rwandans, respectively. While the latter happened almost 5 decades after the former, what is apparent in both of them is the fact that one’s racial identity became one’s marker of death. However, what is not apparent is that before dying, these groups have experienced separation and segregation from others before facing their end. In Wiesel’s book, he wrote that the first edict of the Germans was to prevent Jews “[prohibit them] form leaving their residences for three days, under penalty of death” (Wiesel, 66). This kind of separation, first removed the Jews of their right to freedom, while also making them more controllable. It would not be long after this that the Jews would be forced to march towards their death, while every “Jew had to wear the yellow star” (71). In Wiesel’s recollection of the events that happened during those days, it could be seen that aside from physical separation nd segregation from each other, the Germans also tried to strip...