The Between Nazis And The German Jews

When the Starzynski family was taken from their home by the French police, the onlookers exhibited dehumanization. In this instance, dehumanization was portrayed in the form of indifference, “...shutters began to open, faces peered out from behind curtains... nobody moved, nobody said anything. They simply watched” (Rosnay 18). The onlookers did not view the Starzynskis as their human equals, and they allowed the police to take them to their death without saying a word. Their Jewish religion made them be viewed as less than human, and therefore they felt it was acceptable for them to be taken away to be killed. Once the Starzynski’s friends and acquaintances discovered that they were Jewish, by the yellow star on their clothing, they began to treat them differently. “...most girls stopped speaking to the children with the stars. Or... stared at them with disdain” (47). Once captured and inside the Vel’ d’Hiv, the Jewish people of Paris are treated as animals; the conditions inside the Vel’ d’Hiv are heartless and inhumane. “The girl had to squat against the wall to relieve herself, fighting against the overpowering urge to vomit, her hand clapped over her mouth. People were... defecating wherever they could... cowering like animals near the filthy floor” (30). The captured Jews are not only deprived the basic right of privacy,

The Holocaust, or a jewish sacrificial offering that is burned on an alter, largely refers to the massacre and slaughter of over 6 million european jews from 1933 to 1945. One of the largest genocides took place less than 100 years ago. A recently fresh event on the historical timeline, and yet there would be little known on exactly went on inside the camps without the testimonies of survivors. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, produced the book “Night” as a way to cope with his time in the labor camps and to shed light on the reality of the inhumanity that engulfed numerous concentration camps across europe. After ten years of silence, the book was written by Wiesel to express his personal experiences inside the labor camps, as well as his testimony to horrifying and inhumane actions inflicted upon his beloved family and bunk mates. In “Night”, Elie Wiesel explores the evils in humanity by sharing his personal experiences and personal witness of inhumanity, and shares his own moral values of man.

The Holocaust was a distressing time in history and is not a story everyone can absorb. Both the book, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas written by John Boyne and the film, Life is Beautiful, directed by Robert Benigni, are based upon the real life events of the Holocaust but with a difference. They made clever use of different techniques to dim and censor the reality of the events and interpret it in a more tolerable way. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas depicts the life of a young nine year old boy named Bruno who is the son of the Commandant of the Auschwitz

The examination of the Boy in the Striped Pajamas will examine the lives of the children growing up in a concentration camp. In order to accurately understand the introduction of the Jewish children living in a concentration camp, a brief summary of the movie

In Night, the set change from Elie’s hometown Sighet to the concentration camps truly embodies the change of Elie’s character. At the beginning of the book, Elie portrays himself as a person who desire to learn about the Jewish religion. Moreover, he even finds a teacher to help him to learn about the very essence of the divinity of the Jewish religion, “ I became convinced that Moishe the Beadle would help me enter eternity, into that time when question and answer would become ONE ”(5). In this case, Elie believes god controls humans and god can answer any questions he has. Conversely, as the setting shifts to the concentration camp, the reality of his faith reveals “ Never shall I forget those moments murdered my god and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes”(34). In the concentration camp, he starts to lose faith in god when he sees god doesn’t help them when dehumanizing actions occur on Jews. Specifically, on the Jewish holiday Appelplatz, he questions and criticizes god , “ Why, but why would I bless him? [...] Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? ” (67) By this time, Elie tears off his mask of still believe in god and reveals his true identity: God does not exist, he is hopeless. Moreover, the shift also affects the mood of the story which it transfers the mood from hopefulness to despair and hatred. While in the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, the coming-of-age genre facilitates the illustration of appearance and reality. Initially, when Bruno still lives in Berlin, he plays with his friends all the time and portrays himself as an explorer. When his family moves to the new residence near the camp , however, his parents tell him he can’t play in the back garden and can’t be an explorer anymore. Out of curiosity, he eventually breaks the rule and jump over the back garden. After running through the forest, he

From 1941 to 1945, Jews were systematically murdered in one of the deadliest genocides in history, which was part of a broader aggregate of acts of oppression and killings of various ethnic and political groups in Europe by the Nazi regime. Every arm of Germany 's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics and the carrying out of the genocide. Other victims of Nazi crimes included Romanians, Ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Soviet POWs, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah 's Witnesses and the mentally and physically disabled. A network of about 42,500 facilities in Germany and German-occupied territories were used to concentrate victims for slave labor, mass murder, and other human rights abuses. Over 200,000 people are estimated to have been Holocaust perpetrators. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Gypsies, were transported to the Polish ghettoes. Every person designated as a Jew in German territory was marked with a yellow star making them open targets. Thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR. Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz and many more. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust. Beginning in late 1941, the Germans

Jews undergoing the selection process on the Birkenau arrival platform known as the " ramp"

As well as this, the novel signifies indifference of the will to live, whereas the film hardly mentions it among the Jews. As the end of the story grows near, Elie notes the indifferent attitude of those simply forcing themselves to go on, to survive during a Winter march: “Beneath our feet there lay men, crushed, trampled underfoot, dying. Nobody paid attention to them” (89). Yet again, indifference is illustrated because of how they no longer had the will to push themselves. Instead, the Jews started following orders out of habit and lacked the will to object. Lastly, the novel shows little to no opposition from the Germans, demonstrating Nazi indifference. When the officers at the camp separate the men and women. Elie says these officers declare orders in “words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion” (29). In other words, the Nazi officers are simply carrying out orders to avoid exhibiting that they are against anti-Semitic norms that most Germans have adopted. In the film however, although Bruno’s father is a Nazi general, his mother and grandmother still demonstrate a strong opposition toward the Nazi party’s anti-Semitism the more they are exposed to it. For example, while the mother gets into a big argument with her husband, the grandmother refuses to show up at her son’s house for a visit (Boy in Striped Pajamas). Unlike the Nazis in the novel, this clearly

Since the start of the Nazi occupation in Europe, Jewish communities and individuals were struggling with survival, and fought for their existence. Many Jews tried to evade or overcome the degrading Nazi decrees, that stripped them of civil and human rights, triggered isolation and denied them a livelihood. The Nazis simply wanted to create a condition in which no human being, particularly Jewish, can live or even exist. For a long time, the Jews’ view on the sanctity of life, a duty to protect one’s life, encouraged them to endure the period of intense pain and suffering. From past experience, the Jews thought that the terrible events of the Nazis would pass, the same as the pogroms. Over a period of centuries, from the Crusades to the

There was a pile there already. New suits, old ones, torn overcoats, rags. For us it meant true equality: nakedness” (Wiesel 35). This is dehumanization because the Nazis once again took the Jews’ possessions away and it is not right to take away their clothes when they need them to survive in the harsh climate. Instead, they received striped shirts and pants that did very little to keep them protected. In short, one reason why the theme of Night is dehumanization is because the Nazis took away pretty much everything that the Jews owned.

In the book “Night” written Elie Wiesel, Wiesel wants readers to know the pain and struggles he had to face in the holocaust. In 1944, in the village of Sighet, Transylvania, a boy named Elie was taken from his home and was taken to a concentration camp and spends time talking about being invaded by the Nazi. The purpose of the book was the remembrance of the holocaust and how it causes him to lose faith and his identity. Although the concentration camps were a bad place the people were forced to work, the rhetorical devices imagery, symbolism, and diction is used to present loss in faith and identity.

The Holocaust was a time of great suffering and inhumanity. The novel Night, which took place during this time, was written by Elie Wiesel and talks about his teen self-experiencing the concentration camps of Auschwitz. This is related to the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas which is the story of a young German boy named Bruno who befriends a Jewish boy in a concentration camp. The many similarities and differences between the movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the novel Night include their many themes of “inhumanity” and “guilt and inaction”, and the two also share and differ in the loss of innocence of the characters and how they develop in each medium.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the aloof foreigner Moishe the Beadle gets deported from the town Sighet with other foreign Jews. After escaping, Moishe recalls the horrific scene where the Jews were taken into the forest and, “Without passion or haste, [the Gestapo] shot their prisoners… Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns” (Wiesel 6). During the Holocaust, the Nazi belief that Jews were of an inferior and evil race brought forth little discrepancy on their liquidation and abuse. Anne Marie Hacht puts this notion into a broader context in “Oppression and Genocide” from Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace, pointing out that, “Analysis of literary works… reveals a common denominator of cause: governmental abuse of power that results in the manipulation or attempted extermination of a political or racial minority.” Hacht’s analysis especially applies to the case of Moishe, who witnessed first-hand the massacre of the Jewish minority. The way in which the Gestapo conducted these executions shows just how “normal” acts of genocide and dehumanization were. Ultimately, the elimination and degradation of certain racial, religious, or social subdivisions of society was a common method of

Before the ghettos. Before the train rides, marches, and concentration camps. Eliezer had never experienced such violence against others, much less himself. The Nazi’s ruled with fear; which was instilled with violence. One example of the theme of violence being developed

This essay is going to discuss the ways in which the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews between the years of 1933 to 1938. Through the rise of Nazism, Nazi beliefs and propaganda, Nuremberg laws and the Kristallnacht in which will be explained in detail, I will provide a knowledge based analysis of pre-war life and the initial lead up to the war.