Question

Wiesel writes of his imprisonment, "Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men." What does he mean by this? How was their manhood robbed?

Answer 1

Answer:

Elie Wiesel meant that they were stripped of their manliness, their feeling of men, and a human.

Their manhood or feeling of being a man was robbed when they were ordered to strip and run naked in front of everyone, even if they are strangers.

Explanation:

The memoir Night by Eliezer Wiesel tells the events of the Holocaust and how it had affected the Jews. The book served as a witness to the accounts of the atrocities faced by the Jewish people during the Nazi rule in Germany.

By his statement "Within a few seconds, we had ceased to be men", Wiesel meant that the rights of men to be men were taken from them. This is because they had stopped caring about their nakedness, their physical appearance. They easily stayed naked and did whatever has been ordered by the soldiers to do. They were dehumanized to mere humans, seemingly without any identity or belonging, barely alive.

And their manhood was robbed off them by making them stripped whenever ordered, no longer ashamed of their nakedness. Had they been in their own homes and not in the camps, they'd never even dream of stripping in front of others, let alone among men and strangers they don't know.