I have to admit that I had lost contact with my dear Jew friend, Aaron Bauer. It was unfortunate, but I sincerely believed that our decision was to lift each other’s burden and to protect this friendship. Integrating with one another had been a grave danger for both my wife and I, and Bauer understood our situations. I was no longer part of our secret Communist cell, for most of our Jewish members had dissolved into their separate ways following the aftermath of the Nuremberg Laws. Moreover, my wife and I had been busy with our full-time employment in the Volkswagen factory, for the KdF had promise us many trips and also the “People’s car.” There was time when I was excited about the KdF, but I immediately direct my thoughts to my Communists …show more content…
It happened because of the killing of a German officer, Ernst vom Rath by for a Polish Jew called Herschel Gynszpan (Moeller 105). I witnessed the frightful attack by the Nazis on places related to the Jews such as synagogues, their religious sites, and cemeteries (Bergen “Chapter 5”). All their shops’ windows had been smashed broken. The once graceful streets filled with shops have now been replaced by burned debris and fractures of broken glasses. The Nazis did not only attack their shops and dwellings, but they had also arrested and even murder huge number of Jews (Bergen “Chapter 5”). I saw a young girl being hurled down from a building. I wanted to help her but my timidity had locked both my feet on the ground. An owner of a shop had also been captured by the Stormtroopers, which separated him from his crying wife and daughter. At the sight of this, I thought of Bauer and became frightened for his condition. I leaped to his store, only to find an abandoned and distorted place. Fire has consumed Bauer’s shop, shelf was overthrown, glasses were shattered into pieces, and the safety of Bauer is the only one that I can hope for. When will this violence end? It saddens me to know that Germany is no longer the country it used to be, for racialism has covered it, and ‘unity’ has lost its
After witnessing the killing of a man on Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, the destruction of Jewish property and the arrest or killing of Jews throughout Germany, Michael, then 8, was stunned when his parents did nothing to help the man and made him walk away with their heads down. The reason was that Michael's parents had an important secret, they are spies for the Allies and must stay undercover.
Elie tells of his hometown, Sighet, and of Moshe the Beadle. He tells of his family and his three sisters, Hilda, Béa, and the baby of the family, Tzipora. Elie is taught the cabala by Moshe the Beadle. Moshe is taken away and sees an entire train of people murdered by the Gestapo. He returns to Sighet and tries to warn them, but no one believes his story. The Nazis come and take over Sighet. Elie is moved to a ghetto, along with all the other Jews in Sighet. They soon are taken away in a train to Auschwitz.
Dr. Josef Mengele- Mengele is a SS officer at the camp and he has the responsibility of choosing those who are unqualified to work. He is mean and dark- hearted.
Christopher Browning describes how the Reserve Police Battalion 101, like the rest of German society, was immersed in a flood of racist and anti-Semitic propaganda. Browning describes how the Order Police provided indoctrination both in basic training and as an ongoing practice within each unit. Many of the members were not prepared for the killing of Jews. The author examines the reasons some of the police members did not shoot. The physiological effect of isolation, rejection, and ostracism is examined in the context of being assigned to a foreign land with a hostile population. The contradictions imposed by the demands of conscience on the one hand and the norms of the battalion on the other are discussed. Ordinary Men
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
Night begins with the narrator, Elie, talking about Moishe the Beadle, who is described as the “jack-of-all-trades” in a shtibl (Weisel, 21). He then continues by talking about his family. He goes back to talk about his deep conversations with Moishe and their evenings spent together. One day, the foreign Jews of Sighet, where he lives, were expelled. This included Moishe. They were taken away in cattle cars by the Hungarian police. Months past and one day, Elie saw Moishe sitting on a bench near the synagogue. He tells Elie about what happened to him; how he and the other Jews were transported and forced to dig their own graves in the forest. Luckily, Moishe had managed to escape. He had come back to warn the Jews in Sighet of what to come.
My goal with my research is to look into the resistance of both the Jewish people and the others in European society who assisted in Jewish escapes. The perceived image of the Jews during the Holocaust is of “lambs to the slaughter.” The pictured painted of the rest of European society is one of either knowing accomplices or silent spectators. The Jewish people had many forms of resistance, some small and some large. While many of their neighbors were silent spectators, but many people were actively resisting the tyrannical Nazi government by assisting Jewish escapes. Each of these individuals risked their lives and the lives of their families and friends to aid these hunted individuals. They all deserve to have their stories heard and honored. In a time of complete chaos and destruction many people would not have the ability or fortitude to save the life of another person. The people that I will discuss in this paper were not only able to take that step, but put themselves and their families in real and eminent danger for the life, at times, of a complete stranger.
The first time I walked through the streets of Warsaw, the most populated ghetto, housing over four hundred thousand Jews was June 1, 1937. From over the ghetto’s fence, the smell of retched death seeped over. Every man with me pinched their faces in disgust. An officer walked over to greet us at our station wagon. The excitement in his eyes of meeting greeting me was admiring. He reached his hand out and nervously stated, “I can’t believe I am meeting the one and only Adolf Hitler. How do you do, Sir? Sargent? General?” I shot my hand out confidently, and shook his hand, “Good Day, officer. I have finally gotten the time to visit Warsaw, my apologies for waiting so long. You know what they say,
As humans, we require basic necessities, such as food, water, and shelter to survive. But we also need a reason to live. The reason could be the thought of a person, achieving some goal, or a connection with a higher being. Humans need something that drives them to stay alive. This becomes more evident when people are placed in horrific situations. In Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, he reminisces about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. There the men witness horrific scenes of violence and death. As time goes on they begin to lose hope in the very things that keep them alive: their faith in God, each other, and above all, themselves.
The more of the world a person sees, the more he/she realizes that it is not as perfect as he/she thinks it is. When one matures, he/she gains knowledge and experiences that affect how he/she act and think. Their perspective of the world changes either positively or negatively. Night, an autobiographical memoir written by Elie Wiesel, tells of the horrors he faced as a child during the Holocaust. The more the readers read about his experiences, the more they see how his perspectives change throughout the novel. Emily Dickinson's poem “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark” explains how one must conquer his/her fear in order to see more of the world. The way we perceive things change as we gain more knowledge and experience of the world we live in.
Why must humans be either inherently good or inherently evil? The narrative Night by Elie Wiesel illustrates humanity in one of the darkest periods of history, to abandon humanity to survive vs keeping it from spiraling down into hopelessness. As Eliezer struggles to survive against starvation and abuse, he also grapples with the destruction of his faith in God’s justice and battles with the darker sides of himself.Throughout the novel, Eliezer feels a conflict between protecting his father who poses as a burden and giving himself the best chance of survival. The narrative also brings up a very important question, ‘’Are humans inherently good or evil?’’ How can we ever compare the kindness of the French girl who healed Eliezer 's wounds to the SS officers that had beaten him cruelly? We can not, and not just for that reason alone. Are humans born inherently good and became soiled by the filth and corrupt of the world, conditioning them to forget their morals and turn against each-other? Or are humans born inherently evil judging by their capability to commit heinous crimes and there is no goodness in this world, just people who are far less evil than others? In my opinion, humans are born neither inherently good or evil. It’s not as if Eliezer was born with a moral compass, he was raised with high morals and to serve God (and abandoning him when he feels God is cruel to let them suffer). His experience in the camps allows him to explore the darker concepts in humanity
What begins and has no end, and ends all that which begins? The answer is death. Most of the time, death is a topic people tend to avoid or deviate from since it causes uncertainty and fear to surface. During the Holocaust, however, death lingered through the air as thick, black smoke does, suffocating its victims and cruelly seizing their lives. The grim reaper was a daily visitor in the ghettos, transports, and concentration camps in which about six million Jews perished. Death was not only physical for people also experienced moral, emotional, and spiritual death. Countless people lost the faith and values that they had developed throughout their whole life once they experienced or witnessed the brutality and horrors of the Holocaust. Once
A tragic event can change someone’s life forever in a good way or a bad way. The holocaust shaped people's lives into a way where they can never go back. In “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the main character, Elie, changed as a person due to his experiences at Auschwitz. Elie was a victim of the holocaust and it changed his life forever as a person and a Jew.
“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” The Holocaust, led by Hitler, targeted the Jews, LGBTQ individuals, physically and mentally disabled people and members of political opposition groups. Elie Wiesel in his novel, Night, focuses on his experience as well as the expense of fellow Jews during their time in the concentration camps. Wiesel, in his novel, shows the deshumanization during the Holocaust by portraying the loss of basic human rights, the loss of their individuality, and the loss of familial connections for the Jews and prisoners of the concentration camps.
day before, one of which was merely a child so light in weight that he