The Failure Of Sighet Jews Essay

“The War Against The Jews” by Lucy Dawidowicz explores a very dark time in history and interprets it from her view. Through the use of other novels, she concurs and agrees to form her opinion. This essay will explore who Dawidowicz is, why she wrote the book, what the book is about, what other authors have explored with the same topic, and how I feel about the topic she wrote about. All in all, much research will be presented throughout the essay. In the end you will see how strongly I feel about the topic I chose. I believe that although Hitler terrorized the Jews, they continued to be stronger than ever, and tried to keep up their society.

In the text Night, written by Elie Wiesel, it is a horrific story about how the Nazi’s invaded Wiesel’s hometown of Sighet, Hungry and where taken under German control and sent to many concentration camps. During his time at the concentration camps, Elie and fallow Jews were in harsh and unforgettable conditions and treated severe from the Germans that no one could imagine. There is plenty of evidence which supports that even through many people turned and began to do dreadful things to one another; there were the very few people who stayed calm and gentle within all of the commotion.

Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night tells the unforgettable tale of his account of the savagery and brutality the Nazis showed during the Holocaust. Night depicts the story of a budding Jew from the small town of Sighet named Eliezer. He and his family are exiled to the concentration camp known as Auschwitz. He must master the skills needed to survive with his father’s guidance until he finds liberation from the monstrosity that is the camp. This memoir, however, hides a far more meaningful lesson that can only be revealed through careful analyzation.

In the 1940’s, the typical way to attain News is by radio, so it is a mistake if one takes the only news source he or she has lightly. In Night the Jews of Sighet perform this mistake by ignoring the change of power to Fascist. During the time Germany invaded Hungarian territory, Ellie and his family received terrifying news of how the Fascists are treating the Jews. The Budapest news reported this: “The Jews in Hungary are living in an atmosphere of fear and terror. There are anti-Semitic incidents every day, in the streets, in the trains. The fascists are attacking Jewish shops and synagogues. The situation is getting very serious” (Wiesel 7). Here and there, anxiety begins to stir up, but in a while, confidence begins to settle right back in. Accepting that their Hungarian brothers were being persecuted may have led the Jews to escape but they deny that anything of major significance could happen to them. An additional form of

This quote juxtaposes the normalcy of life before the holocaust with the genocide which was to follow. The Jews of Sighet were unable to accept the possibility that circumstances were dangerous due to the veneer of security. They even questioned Hitler’s desire for extermination! When reading this section, I was curious as to whether the community purposefully ignored the imminent turmoil in order to propagate a false sense of comfort, or if they genuinely believed that no harm was to ensue. Upon this thought, I realized that I am viewing the holocaust with knowledge of what will occur, whereas the Jews of Sighet do not look at the situation with the same knowledge of future events (Certainly, if the Jews of Sighet knew what was to come, they would have responded differently). This understanding drastically changed my view of holocaust survivors. I learned that my analysis of events could not possibly be the same as an individual living through the moment themselves. This realization is what inspired me to research further the factors which influenced survival, as I wanted to learn more about the complexities of enduring the holocaust as it relates to the individuals who were personally affected.

I have begun reading Night by Elie Wiesel. This novel is about the events that Elie Wiesel endured as a teenager and harrowing truths about the holocaust. The first chapter was quickly paced and straightforward. A major part of Eli’s day was studying. A man Elie meets named Moishe the Beadle begins to cause him to question his faith and why he prays. The man is definitely different and this later causes the community to miss a warning sign of their impending doom. Moishe the Beadle is a foreign jew and is taken away months earlier than the other jews. He witnesses and miraculously survives a mass murder of foreign jews by faking dead. After returning to Sighet he attempt to warn the residents of what happened but no one believed him. This is important because at this time there were still visas available but since no one could fathom the idea of an attack on a whole population that included millions no one listened. Eli thinks, “Annihilate an entire people? Wipe out a population dispersed throughout so many nations? So many millions of people! By what means?” (8) I liked this explanation in the book because most holocaust books brush over the reason of not leaving when they sensed conflict besides fear and this seemed much more logical in the fact that it does appear to be unbelievable.

Early on in the memoir, Wiesel has a very strong faith for a young boy. He states, “I was twelve. I believed profoundly” (Wiesel 1). His faith is established early on in order to make a great contrast between his faith in the beginning versus the end of the memoir. Before he is deported, Wiesel wants to study the Cabbala and become a master in Jewish mysticism. He finds a master, Moshe the Beadle, to teach him. The teaching does not last long; however, before Moshe is deported and sent to be killed. Moshe’s stories are the first glimpse of the cruelty and dehumanization that is to come later on in the memoir. Wiesel states, “Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoners” (4). The Gestapo show little to no emotion when killing these deportees, which shows how they view them as inhuman. The people of Sighet do not believe Moshe’s warning, and pass him off as just wanting attention. Their faith in humanity and their God allow them to have hope, and they do not believe that any of his stories are real nor could happen to them. However, their faith is proven wrong and

Since the beginning of the Judaism, the Jewish people have been subject to hardships and discrimination. They have not been allowed to have a stabile place of worship and have also faced persecution and atrocities that most of us can not even imagine. Three events that have had a big impact on the Jewish faith were the building and destruction of the First Great Temple, the Second Great Temple and the events of the Holocaust. In this paper, I will discuss these three events and also explain and give examples as to why I feel that the Jewish people have always been discriminated against and not allowed the freedom of worship.

Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize

In 1940 , Hungary annexed sighet and the wiesel’s were among the jewish families and forced to live in the ghettos.May 1944,Nazi Germany with the Hungary’s agreement, forced jews living in Sighet to be deported to Auschwitz concentration camp. At the age of Fifteen Wiesel’s family were sent to Auschwitz as part of the holocaust, which took the lives of more than 6 million jews. Wiesel’s family was affected during the holocaust, all jews were forced to have their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their heads after all the men left the barber they were all standing around naked finding acquaintances and old friends, they are joyful at finding each other still alive. Elie Wiesel’s Night highlights the overarching issues of discrimination toward the Jews as they are forced to abandon their lives and face a death that consumer their existence, relationships and faith.

The Holocaust was not only a way for the Nazis to purge the Jews, it was also a movement for a new way of thinking, that as long as the person in front of you holds a military-grade firearm there is nothing you can do to change your fate. In the memoir Night, Elie Wiesel recounts his journey through life in nazi concentration camps. Elie struggles with his faith and morality as he and his father witness the horrors of the Holocaust. Night reveals that it’s in human nature to hope for survival through religion and faith, however it can also fail in the most trying of circumstances when you have to relent to authoritarianism.

Three days later, optimism still present, the Jews still refused to believe that God would let dreadful things occur to them even when “German army vehicles made their appearance on their streets” (9). The towns “impressions of the Germans were rather reassuring” (9) at that time, on the contrary of the bloodcurdling conceptions they later gained when the reality of the terrors of Germans had cropped up. Months later, Elie and the other Jews’ faiths become warped when they come back down to earth and the Germans true intentions strike as they enter their long expedition in the death camps.

The townspeople of Sighet also could not comprehend how the Germans would exterminate them and with what means. They thought, "This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages." Since the war seemed so far away the Jews of Sighet remained optimistic despite Moishe the Beadle's warnings. To many of them, including Eliezer's father, it was not worth liquidating their lives in Sighet to move to another country over the possibility of what Hitler promised. Even as the German army came closer and closer the townspeople did not believe the Germans would come that far for strategic and political reasons.

The Holocaust revealed the extreme evil in human nature on both a grand and small scale. Hitler, a strong supporter of antisemitism, had an agenda to create a dominant Aryan race and would stop at nothing to diminish the Jewish population. This meant forcing innocent Jewish people into death and labor camps, where conditions were brutal and treatment was atrociously inhumane. Overtime, this grand scale oppression sparked anger and violence within the victims. Instead of supporting one another in times of trouble, they began to commit senseless acts of violence towards one another in response to the cruelty they faced. Survival became their highest value, at any cost. Elie Wiesel witnesses this first hand on many accounts and spends his life striving to educate the world about the horrors of the Holocaust. In his Holocaust memoir, Night, he uses the motifs: night, silence, and flames, to develop the idea that evil is part of human nature.

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the