The Holocaust destroyed 11,000,000 people's lives. It’s hard to imagine people being killed just because of their religion. Men, women, the elderly, children; all Jewish families were separated. In his book “Night”, Elie Wiesel, who was separated from his mother and sister, describes his experiences and the inhumane conditions he endured at the concentration camps at the hand of German officers. As a result of his experiences during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel changes from a religious, sensitive little boy to a spiritually dead, unemotional man.…
Few historical events were as gut-wrenchingly horrifying as the Holocaust. It inspired countless stories in the decades that followed it. One example, Frank Borowski's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is a saddening story about a man working at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. It details his experiences collecting the belongings of prisoners who arrived at the camp, and his interactions with another worker. A large portion of the text had the narrator describing various specific prisoners, and thinking about how they affect him. This section presented an ironic incompatibility between two outlooks that is worthy of analysis, and provided indication as to Borowski’s intent for writing the story.…
Donald L. Niewyk’s fifth and sixth chapters both deal more with outside perspectives and outside reactions than it does with those who were persecuted. The fifth chapter, “Bystander Reactions,” offers four different arguments as to why bystanders acted they way they did during the Holocaust. The sixth chapter, “Possibilities of Rescue,” discusses three different viewpoints on what foreign governments could have done to prevent the Holocaust. These two chapters conclude Niewyk’s book The Holocaust and wrap up the final sequence of events surrounding the Holocaust and the camps.…
During the late 1930’s the world was contaminated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Holocaust is defined as follows: “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.” During the Holocaust, the Nazis, under the command of Adolf Hitler, liquidated over six million Jews. There is one Jewish survivor whose story especially touched my heart and changed my attitude towards life for the better. This amazing woman is Krystyna Chiger. Krystyna and her family escaped the Nazi liquidation by living in sewers for fourteen months (qtd. in “The Girl in the Green Sweater” 5). Accordingly, thorough assessments of my personal experiences according to the life lessons of Krystyna Chiger descriptively visualize the Holocaust and its everlasting impact on society.…
If there was a god, why would he/she be so harsh? The text is compared to the book Night by Ellie Wiesel and from the poems “Night over Birkenau” and “Harbach 1944”. The book Night tells the story of a young boy and his father fighting for their freedom from the Nazis; Ellie Wiesel tells the story of his experience of the Holocaust. Both of the poems show the journeys of people and how they pictured all of the madness. Ellie fights through many hardships, but comes out of the Holocaust victorious! Ellie and his father were both willing and strong throughout the Holocaust, but his father escaped a different way. The theme states that during survival, people think about needs rather than wants. This is clearly developed in the poems “Night over Birkenau” By Janos Piliszky and “Harbach 1944” and Night to show harshness, survival, and fear.…
A topic that was discussed thoroughly throughout the second half of this class in several novels and movies is guilt, whether criminal, political, moral, or metaphysical. This guilt concerning the Holocaust was discussed in terms of different groups of people, including the offenders, bystanders, or future generations of Germans. In Schlink’s The Reader (1995), for instance, guilt is an integral topic for the book’s main characters and they wrestle with it decades after the Holocaust. However, in non-fictional accounts from survivors, I do not think that their intent is to discuss or imply guilt, as some people believe they do. In my opinion, survivors of the Holocaust strive for its remembrance through a variety of mediums not to instill guilt or shame on future generations, but to preserve their individual, personal stories in history.…
For many people, the Holocaust caused them to lose their friends, families, homes and jobs and for most others, it cost them their lives. We know that the first generation of survivors actually experienced the Holocaust and lived through the hardships but what many people don’t know is that the Holocaust still lives on today, in the stories held in people’s hearts, told to them by parents or grandparents. Another question we must ask ourselves is the youth of today being told the Jew’s story? Are they aware of the devastating event that took place in the years between 1933 and…
In the memoir “Night” we see the atrocious events of the holocaust through the eyes of Ellie Wiesel a young boy from Sighet, Romania. The memoir begins with Ellie and his family in Sighet unaware of the horrible events they will experience. In this book we see how his experiences in the holocaust change his beliefs about god and his complete kindness. The change we see in Ellie is most evident in his opinion, Ellie goes from a very religious and god fearing person and doesn’t question him to someone who questions him and at his lowest point criticizes him.…
The tragedy we know today as the Holocaust has set the mark for horrific events that followed, and to come. This catastrophe is one of the greatest examples of dehumanization, and Elie Wiesel offers his first hand account of the disaster to educate people on what took place during this time. Wiesel shares with his audience the brutality, and hatefulness of the Nazis and their followers. He presents his readers with multiple instances of people being stripped of their rights, and humanity. In correlation with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a number of rights have been broken or cease to exist.…
When learning of the devastations of the Holocaust we are often only offered one side of the story, one view of the event, one account of the pain—that of the direct survivor. However, the effects of trauma live on forever, and stay with people even when they are not first-hand victims. In particular, there are children of Holocaust survivors or second-generation survivors whom face enormous difficulties as they come to terms with the horrendous plights faced by their ancestors. For Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, this was the struggle. Growing up with survivor parents exposed him to the presence and absence of the Holocaust in his daily life, causing confusion and great amounts of self-imposed guilt and blame. This havoc led to an underdeveloped identity early on—a lost and prohibited childhood, a murdered one. The effect of having survivor parents was evident in Art’s search for his identity throughout Maus, from the memories of his parent’s past and through the individual ways in which each parent “murdered” his search to discover meaning.…
The Holocaust is one of the most remembered tragedies in history. It is unfathomable to presume that another human being was capable of causing such terror and horror to millions. The tragedy is widely known and recognized for those who were victims of Hitler and his depraved mind. Yet, one doesn’t know that the world is gradually resurrecting the horrors of this catastrophic event. It is possible for a Holocaust to recur once again and will continue to be a threat, so long as there are people who use others religion as a mechanism of hate, ignorance, and live in fear and vulnerability.…
It’s simple to say that the Holocaust was bad. I don’t think it was third grade and I already knew that. In A Good Day from Survival in Auschwitz, an autobiography by Primo Levi, and Night, an autobiography by Elie Wiesel, I learned the very different first-hand experiences of two young men who dealt with persecution from the Nazi Officers, during the time of the Holocaust. Now although these stories are very different, in truth, they both share similarities as well.…
“It was once said that not remembering the Holocaust means to side with the executioners against its victims; not to remember means to kill the victims a second time; not to remember means to become an accomplice of the enemy. On the other hand, to remember means to feel compassion for the victims of all persecutions. By solemnly commemorating the tragedy of the Holocaust, we will keep history in mind, never forget the past, cherish all lives, and create…
Our memory serves a source for us to remember our past as well as being respectful by paying homage to all the lives lost during such a horrific era. . Memory of activities is powerful and for holocaust is sad story that today can be used to show the evils of racial discrimination, cold blood murder and the importance of living together as one community in love and harmony (Nguyen, 2013). An event such as the Holocaust we must remember when passing stories down that having ethical remembrance is vital. This means separating what really happened and a biased opinion of what we believed happened. We must not give information those sides with one more than the other. Having a forgiving mind is important because at that time these events were presumed to be politically correct. Let our hearts and minds not form a hatred for a group of people because of the…
“Secrets In the Shadows is without a doubt a page turner throughout the book and will have you on the edge of your seat wanting more.”…