Holocaust Testimonies Analysis

Though many innocents died without having the chance to smell freedom again, there have been survivors that have had the chance to openly describe their memories during the Holocaust to others. Each sentence, phrase, and word that the survivors expose through the testimony, are over and above powerful than anyone can imagine. It not only grabs you deep into another dimension, but it proves that no matter what religion, race, belief, or type of person you are, everyone's voice is powerful to change someone fully inside and outside… just like Cesia's

Between memoirs and history textbooks, two very different approaches to historical matters are dealt with: one appeals to emotion, while the other to reason and logic. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, he discusses his life during the Holocaust and what life in a prison camp was like on an emotional level. The treatment of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi guards is more appalling through the emotional description of a survivor like Elie Wiesel than through the contextual and fact based evidence found in a textbook. One such example of this is when Wiesel describes how when the Jews were herded onto the cattle carriages to move them from Geiwitz to Buchenwald, and how the Nazi’s distribution of rations led to the Jews eating snow off one another’s backs:

As part of the human coping mechanism, people hope that life can return to normal after a traumatic event. This is rarely the case, however. Many prisoners released from concentration camps continued to suffer after being released. In the report “Multigenerational Perspectives on Coping with the Holocaust Experience” written by Dan Bar-On et al, numerous studies are cited that support the claim that the Holocaust left a lasting effect on its victims, causing marital problems, anxiety, depression, and other personality disorders. The authors cite a correlation between the concept of the “conspiracy of silence,” the survivors’ perceived need to forget and move on from their traumatic past and the prolonged emotional and behavioral effects of the Holocaust

From 1933-1945 the Nazi Party, in Germany, had a rise which affected not only Jewish lives in Europe. During this timeframe the Holocaust occurred. The Holocaust was an event which ended in about six million Jews being assassinated by a German leader named Adolf Hitler. Hitler had help from the Nazi Party. The Nazis were important because they had such an in depth role in the Holocaust. The Nazis played a huge part in the Holocaust because they changed life for the Jews politically, economically, and socially, treated the Jews in Nazi Germany differently, and came up/ implemented a “Final Solution.”

The Holocaust was a period of terrible experience the Jews faced throughout European history. The Nazis led by Hitler altered life of many Jews politically, socially, and economically. Jews were treated horribly in Nazi Germany, they were forced to work until they passed out, or died. The Nazis also tried to execute all Jews to exterminate the entire population of Jews in Europe. The rise of the Nazi Party in 1933 impacted negatively on the lives of many Jews throughout Europe because it changed life of Jews economically, socially,and politically, they were treated horribly, and many Jews were executed when the Nazis implemented their “ Final Solution.”

The Holocaust was a very traumatic event in history. Every year in school from about middle school onward students learn specifically about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s cruel treatment of the Jewish culture and people during World War II. The same general knowledge is given to us from middle school up until the ending our high school history careers. We are taught to believe that Adolf Hitler was a corrupt man, who sought control of Germany in the 1930’s. Even though we are given background information on this event, and there are things being told to us, no one knows what actually occurred during this time, except those who lived through it. In the book Night published by Elie Wiesel, he explains the things that happened to his family and the people in his community named Sighet before, during, and after the Holocaust. There is more than what meets the eye to this occurrence. No one sees the bigger picture when it comes to this event because of the fact that such a tragedy occurred in the first place. Although the Holocaust was a very unfortunate event, the Holocaust did benefit the United States in a plethora of different ways. Without the Holocaust, World War II would have never happened, and World War II brought countless positives attributes to America. A myriad of things came out of World War II. For example, women earned the right to attain jobs because of the war. Also, America became a global power due to the fact that the Allies (United States, Britain,

“It is necessary to resist the tendency of recent Holocaust scholarships to universalize or collectivize Holocaust testimony, and instead revive the particular by uncovering the multiple layers within testimony.” (1) Zoe Waxman’s 2006 monograph Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation sets out to prove that while the Holocaust has been universalized as one event, historians must explore the social and historical context of the many individual narratives of Holocaust witnesses in order to understand the diversity of experiences. Waxman states “three theses emerge during the course of the present study” (1) and sets out to demonstrate that Holocaust testimonies are historical, to prove that the testimony is mediated by its own history, and that testimonies confirm to the heterogeneity of Holocaust experiences.

When people started to hear stories of what was happening, they didn’t believe them. Even stories coming from a man who survived these cruel actions, Moishe the Beadle. He was persistent in trying to get people to listen, “he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story” (7). Others who experienced the holocaust decided to use their knowledge to educate the public, like Elie Wiesel. By writing Night, Wiesel showed how another holocaust could cause mass destruction and death. These examples show that telling your story is important, even if you think people are

People such as bystanders stood by all around the world and watched as the innocent were killed.

“The fact is they know I went through hell.” -Professor Bacharach, Holocaust Survivor. Ever since many centuries ago, Jewish people were treated unfairly and unjustly according to their religion and characteristics. The Holocaust was a fearful and painful genocide because of anti-semitism throughout European countries. Up to six million Jews died in the harrowing genocide, along with the death of many other religious and ethnical groups ("Documenting Numbers of Victims of the Holocaust and Nazi Persecution"). As much as a fraction of the number of Jews survived. With much grief and sorrow during the Holocaust, the survivors had to suffer the emotional and physical trauma after the event. Survivors had to face the reality of rebuilding their lives after the

As scary as it may seem, I see many similarities to Germany in the 1930’s and the United states present day. You may ask yourself why do you feel this way seeing we seem so very different than this foreign country. In this first prompt, I will try to explain my point of view and explore what may need to be said to Mr. Trump to prevent and act like this from occurring yet another time.

Concentration camps had very little survivors, due to how hard the day to day life was on the concentration camps, and how the other countries such as the soviet union had concentration camps. Concentration camps were designed to kill people so I think it is very interesting to learn about how some people survived. The day to day life in concentration camps was extremely hard so I wondered what they actually did is very interesting. During my research I learned that other countries had concentration camps and that it's not a new idea.

Foremost, to fully develop this hypothesis a requirement is to understand what revisionism means, the Holocaust, and societal morality. Revisionism, per the Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought (1993), is “the

Can fiction tell the same type of story as non-fiction or a factual first-hand account? The Holocaust, a story that has been told from the perspective of the survivor as well as the culprit, novels written, play adaptions, movies, and documentaries. Whether fictionalized or fact, all the stories share common themes – suffering, loss, sacrifice, death, inhumanity and ultimately freedom whether in death or surviving to be liberated in some form or another. Some of these representations have been fictionalized with creative license taken while others are firsthand accounts given in memories. I will explore how a short fiction story telling of the Holocaust compares to the firsthand account of a Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) Officer with the uses of symbols and/or metaphors, narrative order, narrative perspective, the outlook of the author towards the future and how the choice of genre affects the way the story is told.

Why do the survivors of such a tragic event such as the Holocaust want to remember those horrifying times by writing about memories that most people would only want to forget? I will show, Weisel has talked about, and as others have written, that the victims of the holocaust wrote about their experiences not only to preserve the history of the event, but so that those who were not involved and those who did survive can understand what really happened. They wanted the people of the world to realize how viciously they were treated. On top of wanting us to understand, they also want to understand why this happened. Why did the Lord let this happen? Why did the people of the world stand by and let such a thing happen to so many people? Today