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In Night, why is Elie Wiesel summoned to the dentist?
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Elie Wiesel is summoned to the dentist because he has a gold crown on one of his teeth. The Nazis extracted gold from prisoners' teeth to fund the war effort or for personal gain. Elie delays the extraction by feigning illness. Eventually, the dentist, described as having a "death mask" face, is arrested and executed for illegally selling the gold. This episode illustrates the dehumanizing conditions and corruption within the concentration camps.
Eliezer is summoned to the dentist because the gold crown on one of his teeth is going to be extracted. The Nazis, in addition to confiscating the money and property of Jews, stole anything else that was of value, including the gold in dental fillings and dental crowns. Eliezer manages to delay the procedure by telling the dentist, whom he describes as a Jew from Czechoslovakia, that he is ill. Later he learns that the dentist has been arrested and is going to be hanged for profiting on his own from the gold extracted from the prisoners. "I felt no pity for him," Eliezer comments, though the dentist had not been unsympathetic to him in twice putting off the procedure.
The episode indicates, though it has already become clear, that Eliezer has become totally numb to the barbarity taking place around him. As with other events, he narrates it in...
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a resigned tone, as if it is not surprising that this sort of thing is going on. It is not even necessary for us to wonder whether dental work was done with anesthetics: obviously, it was not. The dentist himself, Elie tells us, "had a face not unlike a death mask. When he opened his mouth, one had a ghastly vision of yellow, rotten teeth." The description, though it's incidental to the episode, is one more sign of the horrifying conditions of life in the concentration camp.
Elie Wiesel was summoned to the dentist in Nightbecause he had a gold crown on one of his teeth. Today most crowns are made out of porcelain, but during Wiesel's time, crowns were made from gold. The Nazis would have the camp dentists extract gold crowns from the prisoners' teeth and sell them to support the war effort or, in probably more cases, to line their own pockets. When Elie was at Buna, he was summoned to the dentist along with several other prisoners for this purpose, but Elie feigned illness, and the dentist told him to come back in a week.
At the end of the week, Elie returns to the dentist and once again tells him he is not well. Fortunately, Elie is given another reprieve, and within a few days, the dentist is arrested for trafficking in stolen gold teeth, so Elie keeps his gold crown for the time being.
In Night by Elie Wiesel, why was the dentist executed?
The dentist is executed for corruption, for stealing gold teeth from the Jewish prisoners and selling them. As far as the Nazis are concerned, these gold teeth are state property; they belong to the Reich and so any unauthorized attempts to sell them constitute a very serious crime indeed.
The irony here is that the Nazis themselves are thieves. The gold teeth rightly belong to the Jewish prisoners, not them. But in the Nazis' warped ideology it's the dentist who's committing the serious crime here. Technically, he's a thief, but he only sells the gold teeth he extracts out of necessity, to keep himself alive. The Nazis, however, are motivated by nothing other than pure greed. Not content with murdering Jews, they must also steal from them to line their own pockets.
In Night, author Elie Wiesel is called to the dentist because he has a gold crown on one of his teeth. The Nazis would have gold crowns removed from their prisoners and then melt the gold down to help fund the war effort or to line their own pockets in some cases. Elie tells the dentist he is not feeling well, so the dentist, who Elie describes as a man who "... had a face like a death mask" (Wiesel 49), tells Elie to come back as soon as he is feeling better.
Elie goes back and again tells the dentist he is feeling sick, so he is given one more reprieve. Soon after this, Elie discovers that the dentist has been arrested and put in prison for selling the gold teeth for his own profit. His sentence would be death by hanging. In other words, the dentist was executed for taking money from selling prisoners' teeth which the Nazis claimed as theirs.