How Did Roddie Edmonds Save Soldiers

The concentration camps of the Holocaust were home to countless injustices to humanity. Not only were the prisoners starved to the brink of death, but they were also treated as animals, disciplined through beatings nearly every day. Most would not expect an ill-prepared young boy to survive such conditions. Nevertheless, in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor, Wiesel defies the odds and survives to tell the story. Wiesel considers this survival merely luck, yet luck was not the only factor to come into play: his father had an even greater impact. Prior to their arrival at Auschwitz, Wiesel lacked a close relationship with his rather detached father; however, when faced by grueling concentration camp life, the bond between Wiesel and his father ultimately enables Wiesel’s survival.

Well-known nonfiction author Laura Hillenbrand, in her best-selling biography, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, describes the chilling reality faced by those living in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. As the title suggests, this is not the typical World War II tale of hardship that ends in liberation; rather, it follows the main character, Louis “Louie” Zamperini, through his childhood, Olympic performances, and military career leading up to his captivity, as well as his later marriage and many years of healing. Hillenbrand's purpose is to impress upon her readers the scale of this tragedy as well as remind them of the horror that so many nameless soldiers endured. She adopts an emotional yet straightforward tone in order to get readers to sympathize with the characters and truly understand what they went through. To do so, she manages to make the unique story of one man represent the thousands of others going through the same tragedy.

The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden.

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:

One can tell that in the midst of the inhuman action of the prisoners freezing to death, Elie Wiesel’s dignified father helps cheer on Meir to keep going. Therefore, no matter what the conditions, one individual can grant dignity in the hearts of the perishable jews, to continue to fight for

Strong bonds built upon trust and dependability can last a lifetime, especially through strenuous moments when the integrity of a bond is the only thing that can be counted on to get through those situations. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he writes about his life spent in the concentration camps, while explaining the experiences and struggles that he went through. Although, not everything during that period was completely unbearable for Wiesel. At the time when Wiesel first arrived at the camps, the fear instilled in Wiesel and the loneliness he would have felt forced him to form a stronger attachment to his father. That dependence towards his father gave Wiesel a reason to keep on living. In turn, his

Strong bonds built upon trust and dependability can last a lifetime, especially through strenuous moments when the integrity of a bond is the only thing that can be counted on to get through those situations. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night, he writes about his life spent in the concentration camps, while explaining the experiences and struggles that he went through. However, not everything during that period was completely unbearable for Wiesel. When Wiesel arrived at the first camp, Birkenau, the fear instilled in him and the loneliness he would have felt forced him to form a stronger attachment to his father. That dependence towards his father gave Wiesel a reason to keep on living. In turn, his father was able to support Wiesel and make the experiences in the camps a bit more manageable.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

When relationships are challenged, they can either be made stronger or destroyed. Elie Wiesel’s relationship with his father is tested on numerous occasions throughout the time of the Holocaust. Wiesel writes about his horrific experiences, most of which are in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz, in his memoir Night. Throughout his time in the concentration camps, Wiesel manages to stick by his father’s side, which is hard to do. In doing so, Wiesel’s relationship with his father prospers, rather than declines. Wiesel’s relationship with his father, although difficult to maintain at times, led to his survival during the Holocaust.

Several SS men rushed to find me, creating such confusion that a number of people were some my father and I. Still, there were some gunshots and some dead” (Wiesel 96). Because Elie ran after his father, some people were shot and dead, that could have been him, but Elie did not care. As long as he stayed with his father, he was okay. Even though his father was getting weak, Elie never left his side, even if it meant putting his own life in danger. Most people in the camp did abandon their fathers, however, and would even beat their own fathers to death for a few crumbs. Elie was the different one in this case, he was one of the only people that did not abandon his father and did not just think of himself the whole time. His father and him relied on each other in the camp and because of that they were both able to be so resilient depsite the terrible conditions thy faced. Without his father by his side, Elie did not feel alive. For example, after Elie’s father

“I had no right to let myself die. What would he do without me? I was his hole support.” (Wiesel,87), states Eliezer in Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night. Throughout his memoir, Elie Wiesel perceives how humans commit evil out of fear, however, Wiesel’s relationship with his father made him stronger, gave him purpose, and made him human in spite of the evil that surrounded them. During the Holocaust, millions of Jews suffered the atrocities that the Nazi put them through. For example, the Nazis forced them to live in inhumane conditions in ghettos, cattle cars, and concentration camps. Elie Wiesel’s memoir, NIGHT, examines the Nazi’s process of total annihilation of the non-Aryan race through cruel acts of dehumanization. Elie’s only chance at survival was to stay faithful to protect his father’s life and his hope in that he would remain alive.

Your memoir, Night, drastically changed my view on the world; more specifically, I now sympathize more with individuals who are experiencing a struggle of any kind. This is a result of the brutal details that forced you to create a vivid image of the situation at hand. Before reading Night, I never truly took the time to imagine what it would be like to be in these tragic situations. Therefore, I would like to thank you for bringing this inhumane flaw I possessed to light. The first account of me realizing this flaw, occurred because of the Nazis’ brutality.

In his book, Night, Eliezer Wiesel describes his experience as a young Jewish boy in the Nazi concentration camps. Wiesel and his father, Chlomo, endured the concentration camps from May, 1944 until January, 1945. Wiesel’s father, suffering from dysentery, died before the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945. Throughout the book, Eliezer and his father’s relationship faced many obstacles. Their relationship went from one of alienation, to one of protection, to one of closeness.

AC 63812 A British Soldier’s Values and Standards V A L U E S A N D S T A N D A R D S

Individuals in society today wonder what life is for a person who was a ‘member’ of the German Nazi Party. The novel, Mother Night, takes place during World War II in Europe and America. The main protagonist in Mother Night is Howard W. Campbell Jr., a famous play writer, who has a suspicious identity between Americans and the Germans. Campbell’s main objective is to write his diary while being accused of war crime in a trial in Israel. Many important, meaningful, and powerful scenes are portrayed throughout the novel. But, the three important scenes in Mother Night are the meetings of the prison guards in the beginning of the novel, the reunion with Howard W. Campbell Jr.’s beloved wife Helga, and the death of Howard W. Campbell Jr.