Hope Through The Holocaust
Viktor Frankl once said, “Whoever was still alive had reason for hope.” During the Holocaust, when Germany purged themselves and other countries of Jews, the Jews that were still alive were still hopeful of being saved. In Four Perfect Pebbles by Lila Perl and Marion Blumenthal-Lazan, Marion, her mother, father, and brother Albert try to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany. They are brought to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen with hopes of staying together and being liberated. When they were all liberated and saved off the Death Train, they all lived except her father, that died of typhus a few days later. Having hope through these dark times helped the Blumenthals survive the Holocaust, against all odds. To survive the Holocaust, they had to endure being treated as less than human, and make important acts of bravery and courage.
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“If a jew was even suspected on not complying with the laws, it could lead to beatings, arrests, imprisonment, or even death.” (Pg 18) In Bergen-Belsen, the Jews that died of typhus and other diseases would be burned or buried in mass graves. (Pg 2) While at the camp, cattle cars would be brought to take jews for the east. These transports averaged 1,000 people but some had more than 3,000 Jews. The Blumenthals learned to hope that none of them would be on these cattle cars and brought away. Mistreating the Jews was one of the way the Nazis persecuted and discriminated the Jewish
6 million lives, all of those perished in the holocaust for nothing but their religion; So many died but some survived and one survivor in particular Elie Wiesel author of Night tells his story of how at the age 16 he was deported to a concentration camp with his father and saw what took to survive. In those moments where Wiesel is describing what happened is where we decide is hope really the reason he survived or was it is fear?
The fact that the Jew’s lives were harsh is undeniable, but love, laughter, and nature is what brought them together and kept their spirits alive in spite of the horror around them. Even though Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party destroyed their homes, it doesn’t change how they choose to live their lives. The Jews were very supportive and remained remarkably positive during the days of the Holocaust. No matter what happens, they’ll be next to each other and triumph their spirits with love, laughter, and the beauty of
The concentration camps were horrible, they were a work from sun up to sun down place. The S.S. officers dehumanized the jews by treating them like animals, taking away their identities, and reducing their rights to almost nothing. In the Jewish concentration camps there were many things that were harsh on the jewish. One of these things was transportation. All of the Jews had to get put in cattle cars and shipped to camps.
If only you were in the holocaust and had something to keep yourself happy. What would that one thing be to help your spirit triumph? Believe it or not many Jewish people had to keep their self happy, like Etty Hillesum or Syvia Perlmutter, just make it out of those camps alive. Even in some of the hardest times they would need to stay happy to stay alive. They many many more thing than just one one.
The first man to lose faith and hope was Stein of Antwerp. He survived the concentration camps because of his hope he would get to see his family again. Stein was a family member that had heard about a transport and waited to see if Wiesel and his father had news about his wife and boys. Wiesel knew his mother hasn’t received a single letter since 1940, yet he lied and said, “Yes, my mother’s had news from your family. Reizel is very well. The children too. . . ” (41). Stein would often tell Wiesel’s father to take care of his son that need to eat and get strong so he wouldn’t get picked for selection. Three weeks later Stein had received word about a transport from Antwerp that had just came in. Stein figured they would have news about his wife and children. Stein went off and that was the last time anyone seen him, he must have received real bad news (42).
(46) When discussing the sorrowful thoughts and possibilities of their family's future, it reflects their sense of hope acting as a shield to protect one another from the darker alternate possibilities they know are more likely. Wiesel notably echoes the idea of how his father and he know it is unlikely that his sister and mother made it to a camp, but they both decide to reflect the optimism and hopeful nature in case the other one truly believes, showing how they do not have much hope or truth in what they believe happened to their family, but they have hope that this will motivate the other to continue to survive. The Holocaust was an unfathomable event that brought out the worst thoughts and even worse realities, but these events did not dictate the way Wiesel and the prisoners
Holocaust narratives are often stories of maintaining hope throughout inhuman treatment, but there is more to it than that. In the case of Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, first published in English in 1960, hope is denial. Hope is, prior to Elie and his family being sent to Auschwitz, the denial that extermination is imminent. Hope is the denial that what they have heard about the Nazis is true, allowing them to complacently live in a ghetto and then be shipped off by train to a concentration camp. However, after they have arrived hope takes on a new form. Hope is no longer an act of self-destruction, but instead an act of self-preservation. For Elie, to hope in a concentration camp is to deny the very real possibility that his father, Shlomo, will not survive until the end of the war, and for Shlomo hope is the denial that his son will die. For each of them, the hope required to continue living is not the hope that they themselves will survive the war, but instead the hope that the other one will. In Elie’s memoir, hope is both a pathway towards death and survival.
Where there is doubt along with darkness, the human spirit finds a way triumphs. In the documents A through E, different stories are told through books or from someones perspective of the time during the Holocaust. The characters mostly seem to be happy in this tough time bringing up the question, how does the spirit triumph. The love, the laughter, and the natural beauty helps the human spirit prevail. To help these people think and feel positive, they find a way to love.
Between Dignity and Despair, a book written by Marion A. Kaplan, published in 1998, gives us a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany by the astounding memoirs, diaries, interviews with survivors, and letters of Jewish women and men. The book is written in chronological order of events, from the daily life of German Jewish families prior to when the Holocaust began to the days when rights were completely taken away; from the beginning of forced labor and exile to the repercussion of the war. Kaplan tries to include details from each significant event during the time of the Holocaust. Kaplan
Jewish prisoners were forced to walk hundreds of kilometers, for up to a month, in freezing cold temperatures by the Nazis of Germany during the Holocaust. The prisoners were forced to go through weeks of suffering, even though they were walking away from their liberators. It is important to remember why death marches were initiated, the suffering the prisoners had to go through, and the major death marches with the most deaths. Death marches were initiated in 1944, and the SS guards called them “evakuierung,” a euphemism meaning evacuation. Most of the time, prisoners were given one loaf of bread for the whole march, and a few rags to keep warm. If they couldn’t keep up, the prisoners were shot. Death marches were an easy and convenient way to evacuate camps and kill off many Jews. There were many different reasons for initiating death marches, the Jews went through a lot of suffering, there were many different major marches, and the prisoners died for many different reasons.
One of the many reasons why the jewish called them “DEATH CAMPS”. (living conditions, labor and executions)
The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.
Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the
These camps were set up along railroad lines so that the prisoners would be conveniently close to their destination. Unfortunately, many prisoners didn't even survive the train ride to the camps. Herded like cattle, exhaustion, disease, and starvation ended the long treacherous journey for many of the prisoners. On the trains, Jews were starved of food and water for days. Nearly 8% of the people did not even survive the ride to the camps. (Nyiszli, 37)
Cattle cars. The Austrian soldiers forced about eighty Jews into each cattle car as the way of transportation to Birkenau. In these small