The Holocaust And The Beliefs Of The Holocaust

We all know the horrific experience, the Jews faced during the Holocaust and after it. Even after some survived the holocaust physically, they will always be tormented and haunted by those gruesome memories from those inhumane actions that were directed towards them. After, all they went through it is obvious the holocaust affected the survivor 's drastically, but how about the future generations of Jews. In which I believe the holocaust did in fact affect the second generation, but the third generation of Jews as well.

In spite of the fact that it is a commonly known historical piece of the Holocaust, it’s authenticity has been questioned. Some conspiracies deny that it even happened at all. Through the analyzation of Hitler’s own violent anti-Semitism, powerful position, and ability to convey Nazi propaganda into action, one can see how he is the sole cause of the Holocaust.

There is one singular question that persists in humanity from the beginning of time, a question regarding the existence of perhaps the most influential figure in the universe: God. In the memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel details his experiences in the holocaust, his journey from his small Jewish community in Transylvania to the subsequent concentration camps which housed him in his later youth. In this haunting account, Wiesel explores his own journey from a devout young man to one that will question his own faith, the existence of God, and how one could still believe in a “right and just” God after witnessing such atrocities.

The holocaust unleashed unparalleled cruelty and suffering to a great number of people; Elie Wiesel survived these hardships, but his innocence was shattered. For this reason, he wrote Night to share his personal memories of his time spent in the concentration camps and details the transformation of his faith and understanding of God. Each person Elie writes about attempts to reconcile their agony with their faith, albeit many fail or have their faith transformed. In this paper, I will describe how Wiesel’s understanding of God transforms as he experiences tragedy and how the various prisoners come to terms with their faith.

In The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, Ian Kershaw provides an illustration of the interpretations of the Holocaust that place Hitler as the driving force behind the elimination of the Hebrew population in Germany. Kershaw describes how the term ‘the Holocaust’ was initially adopted by Jewish writers in preference of the generic descriptive term ‘genocide’. By ostensibly stating that, “without Hitler's fanatical will to destroy Jewry, which crystallized only by 1941 in tools realizable aims to exterminate physically the Jews of Europe, the Holocaust would almost certainly not have come about,” Kershaw embodies the interpretations that place Hitler as the ultimate cause for the planned annihilation of the Hebrew population in Europe.

It’s about the jews and how and what happened to them after the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the time where about six million jews and one million other people dying. Most people were killed because they belonged to different races and religions. The Nazis wanted to kill people that weren’t from their same religious group. The Nazis also killed people who disrespected Hitler. Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party.

In Elie Wiesel’s Night, the Holocaust and its atrocities are presented to us in a detailed manner. However, this book takes us deeper than just the physical triumphs and horrendous encounters, but also the pain of loosing complete faith in God. Wiesel goes as far as saying “In the depths of my heart, I felt a great void” (60). Anyone who went through such an atrocity, where the most unfathomable things occurred, where children and families were ripped apart and murdered, would question or even loose their faith in a God.

It is a universal maxim in the tenets of the main monotheistic religions, that, if a Christian/Jew/Muslim holds true to God, they will assert the continued existence of, “the self,” the monotheistic-trio’s idea being the most overt with Judaism, one of the trio, during the dark period of history titled the Holocaust. From 1933 to 1945, the Holocaust was essentially a methodical killing of certain categories of people - 11 million total, 6 million being Jews, the rest being Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled - by a party of cold, intelligent, unempathetic people, going by the name of Nazis. However, ‘twas not always direct killing, but sometimes the killing of “the self,” that being defined as a person’s ability to make personal decisions

The novel Night by Eliezer Wiesel is one that will open up the readers mind to a whole new view of the happenings in the concentration camps during the Holocaust. Eliezer, in the beginning of the novel had an exceptional dedication to his faith. He spent every day studying Talmud (central text of Judaism that focuses on Jewish law and history), but at night he would study Kabbalah (mystical interpretation of the bible) with his companion Moshie the Beadle. The exile of the Jews to the concentration camps took a huge toll on Wiesel, which caused his faith to shake and grow weak throughout the process of the events. This papers purpose is to dive into the journey of Eliezer Wiesel’s decline of faith during the Holocaust.

The term Holocaust is one that the world is used to hearing, but only a few people really know what it really means. Today the Holocaust is understood most clearly by Jews and those living during World War II, but not all currently in the world know the full meaning of what the Holocaust meant to those it affected most—the Jews. The word Holocaust is a Greek word that was used to describe the horrific historical event that occurred during World War II. The term holos means “a whole”, and kaustos means “burned” in Greek. Historically the Greek term Holocaust was used to describe the sacrificial offering burned on the altar.

The reign of the Holocaust took place between the years of 1933 to 1945, where Jews were persecuted, starved, and murdered by the Nazis. It was December 17, 1942, when the United States joined the Allies to condemn Nazi Germany’s “bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews” (FDR and the Holocaust, FDR Presidential Library and Museum). The thirty-second president of the United States of America, Franklin D. Roosevelt believed that rather than saving more Jews from the Holocaust, America should focus on controlling the number of immigrants coming to America. From the book, FDR and The Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, stated from Roosevelt, “This prejudice helped shape his overall vision of what America should look like—and it was a vision with room for only a small number of Jews who, he said, should be ‘spread out thin” (qtd. Weinstein).

Although the Holocaust was a horrific event that caused thousands upon thousands of people to lose faith in their God, some people were able to come out of the holocaust stronger and with more faith in God. Some people thought of it as their God testing them to see how faithful they really are, while others thought of it as a draining situation. Most of the victims had the mindset that a God they had devoted so much of their lives to would not put something like this in their life, which in turn caused them to lose their faith in their God. Some people have to ability to pull positive things out of any situation, no matter how bad it may be, and that is what was really important during the Holocaust. ”We who lived, in concentration camps can

In recent years the study of the Holocaust has been one of the most interesting topics for historians to debate and analyze. There are so many different topics to consider and to discuss them all would exceed the scope of this paper. In particular, many historians like to understand what events and actions ultimately led to the Holocaust. Many scholars have debated and interpreted the process that led to such a tragic time in history. Despite many scholarly opinions, it is evident that scholars tend to focus on Hitler’s rooted ideologies in the Nazi Regime, as well as the idea that the Holocaust was a result of failures within the Nazi system. These two major views and themes will be discussed throughout the paper.

Eckardt presents the idea that the Holocaust was a result of three distinct factors; that it was the culmination of the church's teaching of contempt, the culmination of the church's absolute theology and finally the culmination of modern man's self-liberation from the shackles of God and morality .

Known as one of the most horrific events in history, World War II (WW2) caused tremendous adversity and suffering amongst the lives of people across the globe. However, what is most concerning about the war, was what happened behind closed doors, specifically within Germany. The Holocaust is still considered one the worst ethnic cleansing attacks in the world. Although there is an endless amount of research and hard evidence of the Holocaust occurring, certain groups of individuals strongly reject it. Known as “Holocaust Denial”, this conspiracy theory has always been personally intriguing due to several reasons and will be analyzed more thoroughly.