Circle of Death

Prisoners of the Holocaust

Life in the ghetto was subjected to death. Many took their own lives, and others tried to escape.

* Sense of the tragic nature of the life of African Americans in poor areas (para 5): “the pimps, the whores, the junkies”

The Holocaust was one of the world’s major tragedies. If you were a Jew the Nazis would take you to concentration camp and you would have to do everything they said, you would get your head shaved, and be treated awful. Millions died. They would choose Jews to take to the gas chamber, usually the weakest and most unhealthy ones because they weren’t much good to work anymore. “Yolen, Jane. The Devil's Arithmetic. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Viking Kestrel, 1988. Print.”

According to Merriam-Webster a ghetto is, “ a part of a city in which members of a particular group or race live usually in poor conditions (ghetto).” This paper will focus, however, on what daily life was like in the ghettos, what Jews did or didn’t do to prevent their fate, and how Holocaust survivors are doing now. I chose this topic because when Elie and his family were living in the ghetto in the beginning of Night, it seemed as though they had plenty of opportunities to escape that they didn’t take. It also seemed much closer to pleasant than I imagined, and I was curious to see if that was completely true.

would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war. However this would not be

At the “Wannsee Conference”, which took place in Berlin, on January 20, 1942 the German regime with its main protagonists Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler planned the ‘final solution of the Jewish question. Even if massacres of about one million Jews occurred before the plans of the Final Solution, with the decision to eradicate the entire Jewish population, extermination camps were built and industrialized mass slaughter of Jews began in earnest. The scene where a train of Schindler’s workers was wrongly sent to Auschwitz shows such an extermination camp were the Nazis systematically gassed thousands of Jews. Another example for the organized genocide is the mass cremation after the mass execution during the eviction of the ghetto in Krakow.

In Night, Elie Wiesel descriptively shares his Holocaust experience in each part of his survival. From the ghettos to the Death March and liberation, Elie Wiesel imparts his story of sadness, suffering and struggle. Specifically Wiesel speaks about his short experience in the Sighet ghettos. Ghettos were implemented early on in the Holocaust for the purpose of segregating and concentrating the Jews before deportation to concentration camps and death camps. Depending on the region, ghettoization ranged from several days to multiple years before deportation. All Jews in ghettos across Europe would eventually face the same fate: annihilation (“Ghettos”). Wiesel’s accurate account of the Sighet ghettos illustrates the poor living conditions, the Judenrat and Jewish life in the ghetto as well as the design and purpose of the two Sighet ghettos. Wiesel’s description of the Sighet ghettos demonstrates the similar characteristics between the Sighet ghettos and other ghettos in Germany and in German-occupied territories in addition to the differences between the various ghettos.

Women and children were beat and men were murdered and rounded up to go to concentration camps. These attacks came after Herschel Grynszpan shot a member of the German Embassy. In two days, over 250 synagogues we burned, 7,000 Jewish businesses were looted and dozens of Jewish people were killed.

There was little, if any economic gain; in fact, one would think that the Holocaust brought economic loss to Germany because Jews owned a greater majority of the shops at the time. The Jews represented absolutely no threat to the German nation, nor to the Nazi party as a whole (Judy 1). The rational nature of its execution, its efficiency, calculability, predictability and control are even more inhumane in that every extermination system was planned to kill as many Jews as possible, as fast as possible. This methodical slaughter of 11 to 12 million human beings began in late 1938 and ended in 1945. Of the approximately 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, more than half were systematically exterminated in the inhumane death traps, such as furnaces and gas chambers, of the Nazi Death Camps between 1942 and 1945 (History 1).

Do humans have the right to determine when another person should live or die? A question that we have all have been asked in different ways and we have been conditioned to respond with, no. This notion then gets more difficult when we are introduced with extreme situations of; what if in order to save an innocent person’s life, you had to kill another? What if the person is too dangerous to keep alive? Humans are fallible and cruel creatures. This is the focus of the Manga called Death Note, Created by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata in 2004. Death Note is a story about how a young man named Light Yagami, who acquires a Death Note, a tool used by Gods of death called Shinigami who use these tools to keep a balance of life and death and order. When one Shinigami named Ryuk becomes bored and becomes curious of what the humans would do with his death note, he throws it down to the human world and sees what happens. Thus, Light transforms from a young man who aspires to bring justice to the world, into a faceless dictator who kills thousands of criminals and bypasses the justice system that he strives to protect. Humans were never designed to have such power and with such accessibility to these means to kill with just a name and a face in mind would have the negative consequence of creating a monster.

¨ The Ghetto was not guarded . One could enter and leave as one pleased. Maria our former maid, came

With all of the false stereotypes being relayed to the people, hate towards the Jews became normal. Kurt Mobius, a German police officer working at a concentration camp in Poland, said, “I believed the propaganda that all Jews were criminal and subhumans” (Marcovitz 18). The constant anti-Semitic distortion made it easy for

Eventually Jews and other ‘undesirables’ were sent to death camps, while others went to forced labour camps and used as slaves to produce materials for weapons in war, and a range of goods, such as shoes, clothes and good. These death camps

Their main goals were to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans.The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join the partisans. Still, some Jews made the decision to resist. Weapons were smuggled into ghettos. Inhabitants in the ghettos of Vilna, Mir, Lachva , Kremenets, Częstochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and