'The Holocaust In John Kertesz's Fatelessness'

The average person’s understanding of the Holocaust is the persecution and mass murder of Jews by the Nazi’s, most are unaware that the people behind the atrocities of the Holocaust came from all over Europe and a wide variety of backgrounds. Art Spiegelman’s Maus: a Survivor’s Tale, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution, and Jan Gross’s Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedbwabne, Poland, all provides a different perspective on how ordinary people felt about their experiences in the Holocaust both perpetrators and victims.

“...Holocaust literature has attested to...a diversity of effects of traumatic experiences during the Holocaust...” (Aharoni-David and Zeidner 266). Literature relevant to that of the Holocaust has depicted and portrayed problems during the time period.  Through these publications, readers visualize the turmoil of communities during World War II and the suffering that transpired as a result of the war. The justification of these events through writing, proves literature showcases World War II and the Holocaust in a precise manner. The Holocaust is accurately portrayed in literature involving the mistreatment of people, the genocide of religious groups, and the negative effect of these traumatic events.

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.

The Holocaust was part of most infamous events in our modern world history, World War II. Night by Elie Wiesel shows one of the horrific lives lived in a concentration camp. This book brings insights including ways and effects of dehumanization and also effects on the antagonist’s followers.

At first glance, Night, by Eliezer Wiesel does not seem to be an example of deep or emotionally complex literature. It is a tiny book, one hundred pages at the most with a lot of dialogue and short choppy sentences. But in this memoir, Wiesel strings along the events that took him through the Holocaust until they form one of the most riveting, shocking, and grimly realistic tales ever told of history’s most famous horror story. In Night, Wiesel reveals the intense impact that concentration camps had on his life, not through grisly details but in correlation with his lost faith in God and the human conscience.

World War II is a very impactful point in history where the Holocaust is viewed as one of the worst acts of human genocide. Countless Jewish victims endured traumatizing amounts of suffering and pain that transformed their lives as these experiences deprived them of their humanity and trust in others. The novel ‘’Night’’ depicts the extraordinary and painful experiences that many Holocaust prisoners endured: portraying the traumatizing effects it had on the survivors. The novel is written by Eliezer’s perspective as a survivor whose faith in god, faith in humanity, and sense of justice in the world are affected by the impact of his experiences during the Holocaust. Eliezer lived in Sighet, a town in Hungarian Transylvania, growing up to study the Torah and the Kabala with the help of a friendly teacher named Moishe the Beadle. Eliezer receives lessons from Moishe the Beadle who instructs and teaches him about Jewish mysticism and about Jewish culture. Eliezer’s willingness and motivation to study his religion highlights his devotion and strong faith towards God in the beginning of the novel but later disintegrates as he experiences the process of selection and the Germans’ Final

Between Dignity and Despair, a book written by Marion A. Kaplan, published in 1998, gives us a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany by the astounding memoirs, diaries, interviews with survivors, and letters of Jewish women and men. The book is written in chronological order of events, from the daily life of German Jewish families prior to when the Holocaust began to the days when rights were completely taken away; from the beginning of forced labor and exile to the repercussion of the war. Kaplan tries to include details from each significant event during the time of the Holocaust. Kaplan

Although the world continues to face tragedy, little compares to that of the horrors millions of innocent Jews like Elie Wiesel faced, as they were deported from their homes, separated from their families and pushed around into different concentration camps where they were brutally tortured, killed, and discarded of by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany Army beginning in 1941. It wasn’t until April of 1945 that Elie along with the limited number of other survivors were finally liberated. This mid 20th century atrocity has come to be known as the Holocaust, a tragic part of history that will never be forgotten. It was because of that experience, that Elie Wiesel extensively depicted the events he faced through written and verbal accounts including the speech he gave entitled “The Perils of Indifference” on April 12, 1999. The speech was given at the 7th Millennium Evening at the White House, with an intent to create a kairotic moment with the public including the audiences it was broadcasted to, as an opportunity to explain a darker side of history, while also hopefully enlightening them for the future.

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 .

The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of

Peter Longerich's Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews is a recent contribution to the contemporary scholarly literature on the subject. The book was originally published in 1998 in German, under the title Politik der Vernichtung, Politics of Destruction. This 2010 English-language release is, as the author claims, shorter in some areas and longer in others. The primary additions include a chapter on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic, which adds considerable meat to the contextual evidence that Longerich includes in his history of the Holocaust. Moreover, the author draws on the release of new primary source data from the archives in Warsaw and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, which have only recently been revealed, archived, and cataloged.

Karl Schleunes published his book titled The Twisted Road to Auschwitz in 1970. The title of the book has a symbolic meaning that pertains to the Holocaust. The Holocaust, taking place between 1933 and 1945, was characterized by the death of millions of European Jews in the hands of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler and nations that collaborated with the Nazis (Dwork & Pelt 2). After crumpling of the Nazi regime, historians began to examine and come up with constructs leading up to the Holocaust. From the mid-1960s to the 1980s, historians established two metanarrative schools of thought emerged explaining the period and circumstances leading up to the Holocaust. These schools of were labeled ‘Intentionalists’ and ‘Functionalists.’ These schools present

Bunting, Eve, and Stephen Gammell. Terrible Things: an Allegory of the Holocaust. Jewish Publication Society, 1989.

In this account of Post-Holocaust publication, Berel Lang presents thoroughly researched information that rebuts some of the common moral, historical and theological claims of the events that took place during this period. The content and the events and ideas discussed in this book are focused on the possibility of this historical event with all the sadism and evil that it brings to mind is able to define a post holocaust, with those who survived the event as well as historical scholars' of the era introducing new ways of the reconstruction of the events that took place as well as their ramifications. In addition, the holocaust appears to be an historical event taken advantage of by people from various perspectives for various reasons other than that of that of using it as a cautionary benchmark to deter reoccurrence of such an event ever again. This is a fact the author struggles with throughout the book and one that works in his favor by bestowing a moral authority over his scholarly reflections.

“At The Mind’s Limit” is a series of essays written by Jean Amery, a German born Jew who survived the holocaust, who gives the reader a very interesting perspective into the mind of a persecuted Jew from 1935 forward. Amery does not consider himself a religious Jew or one who follows any Jewish traditions. In fact, he did not know that Yiddish was a language until he was 18. So Amery describes the events leading up to and following the holocaust through the eyes of an “intellectual” and tries to find out whether being an “intellectual” helped or hindered his mental and spiritual capacity as he experienced