The Boundaries Of Compassion By Bernhard Schlink

The emotional connection Wiesel has to the injustice and inhumane acts from other people being a survivor from the Holocaust

When one loses someone or something valuable to them, the grief can be intense. But what happens when what they lose is actually a piece of them? Novels depicting a witness account of The Holocaust (1941 - 1945) paint a picture of the violence and moral anguish, which is accompanied by a loss to the protagonist. The plot shows a process of events that ultimately leads to death and devastation. Both protagonists in Elie Wiesel’s Night and Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist gradually fall into the abyss of inhumane behaviour. Post Holocaust, they embark on a new life free from social restraints and become either unmindful or compliant to the losses they faced on their journey. Elie and Wladyslaw

Barbara Huttman’s “A Crime of Compassion” has many warrants yet the thesis is not qualified. This is a story that explains the struggles of being a nurse and having to make split-second decisions, whether they are right or wrong. Barbara was a nurse who was taking care of a cancer patient named Mac. Mac had wasted away to a 60-pound skeleton (95). When he walked into the hospital, he was a macho police officer who believed he could single-handedly protect the whole city (95). His condition worsened every day until it got so bad that he had to be resuscitated two or three times a day. Barbara eventually gave into his wishes to be let go. Do you believe we should have the right to

In the article “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” Stephen Asma, a professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Scholar at Columbia College Chicago, argues that the existence of monsters have a purpose in our lives. It is not only to reveal our deepest fears, but to question our moral instincts. Being attacked by fictional monsters seems impractical, however, chaos and disasters do happen and exist in the real world. The creation of monsters is due to our reaction of our fears and the inability to control the world we live in.

No one can truly understand sympathy until they have suffered. In his The Chosen, a postmodern novel, Chaim Potok surveys the meaning of compassion learned through suffering. Danny Saunders, a brilliant Hasidic Jew, lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn along with his friend, Reuven Malter, in the 1940s. With his photographic memory, Danny aspires to become a psychologist, but he knows that he will have to inherit his father’s position as the rabbi of their community. In addition to this, his father, Reb Saunders, will not speak to him about anything other than the holy book of Talmund. Danny is forced to keep his ideas and experiences to himself, leading to him suffering because of this silence. Chaim Potok’s The Chosen uses Danny’s gradual shift

The Holocaust, yet another unpleasant time in history tainted with the blood and suffering of man. Human beings tortured, executed and starved for hatred and radical ideas. Yet with many tragedies there are survivors, those who refused to die on another man’s command. These victims showed enormous willpower, they overcame human degradation and tragedies that not only pushed their beliefs in god, but their trust in fellow people. It was people like Elie Wiesel author of “Night”, Eva Galler,Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser, and Solomon Radasky that survived, whose’ mental and physical capabilities were pushed to limits that are difficult to conceive. Each individual experiences were different, but their survival tales not so far-reaching to where the fundamental themes of fear, family, religion and self-preservation played a part in surviving. Although some of these themes weren’t always so useful for survival.

Even when faced with traumatic malice,humans have the capacity for great empathy and benevolence. To begin, when compassion was shown to Elie. Elie was beaten severely and backed up into a corner till he no longer fought back. A French girl merely wiped his forehead, smiled, secretly gave Elie a bread crust and offered advice. These inspirational, encouraging, and compassionate words were enough to keep Elie holding on with the little hope that he had, ‘“Bite your lips, little brother… Don’t cry”,she pleaded, “ Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later the day will come but not now… Wait. Clench your teeth and wait” (Weisel,53). Next,is when Elie shows compassion to Raziel's husband,Stein. Stein begins frantically passing through rows in the bunks,asking for “Weisel from sighet.” Once found, Stein begins explaining that he was deported in 1942 to a concentration camp and begged to know how his wife and two boys were,since Elie’s mother was Stein’s aunt. Weisel did not recognize Stein, but Elie immediately knew who he was. "Yes,my mother did hear from them. Reizel is fine.

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.

In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel is a young boy who struggles to survive after being forced to live in the brutal concentration camp of Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, death and suffering is rampant, but due to compassionate words and actions from others, Elie is able to withstand these severe living conditions and overcome the risk of death in the unforgiving Auschwitz. As shown through the actions and words of characters in Night, compassion, the sympathetic pity for the suffering or misfortune of others is critical to the human experience because it enables humans to empathize with each other, empathizing which allows us to feel the need to assist others which can often be vital for survival.

others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.” My precept is that it lies at the heart of all

While Elie Wiesel, a Jewish boy subjugated to the violence of the Holocaust in Night, embarks on his atrocious journey in struggling to survive the brutality perpetrated on him, he loses his innocence in the traumatic circumstances. Wiesel’s main aspiration of writing about his development from childhood to adulthood is to showcase how cruelty within society can darken innocents’ souls. As Elie grows throughout the story, he starts to understand that he has changed from a pure, little child to a young man filled with distress and thoughts of danger. He reflects over what kind of individual he has evolved into because of the all the killings and torture he has witnessed: “I too had become a different

Before the times of World War II, due to growing tensions inside Germany, Adolf Hitler, a radical martinet, quickly rose to power. Once he gained trust and leadership over the German community, Hitler’s true goal came to light. The Holocaust, well-revered as the largest genocide of all of history to date, is a prime depiction of dehumanization at its finest. Although many believe it’s impossible to truly convey the atrocities incurred, Elie Wiesel and Roberto Beninin have done an excellent job to give their audiences a glimpse at how it felt to live in those troubling times.

Compassion represents an “acknowledgement of another’s suffering and is accompanied by the expression of a desire to ease or end that suffering.” (Van der Cingal, 2009, p. 124) This is a fundamental characteristic usually found in health care workers and nurses especially. In one twelve hour shift, a nurse’s job can change from taking vitals and administering medications to performing life saving measures

The TED talk “Expanding Your World of Compassion”, By Robert Thurman, was filmed October 2009 at the Chautauqua Institution. In this TED Talk about compassion, Robert Thurman addresses the seven steps to achieve compassion (10:33). The steps include: the foundation of equality, mother recognition, the feeling of gratitude, loving your enemies, universal compassion, compassion for yourself, and living life with equality for everyone(10:56-16:09). He goes into full detail about each step and how it relates to attaining compassion.

Books, films, documentaries, and even memories: each serves to recount past events, each in a different way. While these accounts of the past are shared, they serve to provide the audience with an understanding; oftentimes this understanding does not and cannot portray the effect of certain, unimaginable events in history, such as the Holocaust, on individuals. In his essay, “The Presence of the Past,” Bernhard Schlink brings to the surface some of the inherited struggles that generations of German people have faced as a result of the Third Reich. Alongside his essay, Schlink also presents the effect of the past on people in his novel, The Reader, when he presents the audience with a character placed in a situation that is highly uncommon.