Introduction: During the Holocaust, many people suffered from the despicable actions of others. These actions were influenced by hatred, intolerance, and anti-semitic views of people. The result of such actions were the deaths of millions during the Holocaust, a devastating genocide aimed to eliminate Jews. In this tragic event, people, both initiators and bystanders, played major roles that allowed the Holocaust to continue. Bystanders during this dreadful disaster did not stand up against the Nazis and their collaborators.
Never before had I encountered the issue of choice so dramatically framed by the course of events and so openly discussed by at least some of the perpetrators. Never before had I seen the monstrous deeds of the Holocaust so starkly juxtaposed with the human face of the killers (Browning, XVI) Browning then goes on to present different challenges he faced when doing his research and writing the book. He also presents different historians and their onions, as well as other individuals who helped in doing his research. The first chapter describes Major Wilhelm Trapp, the commander of the RPB-101 briefing his men on the assignment that they have been giving: round up the Jews n the village of Józefów separate the ones who are able and of working age and shoot the rest. After describing the assignment and reassuring all of the men that it was okay to kill these innocent people, Trapp offers the men an out “if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out” (Browning, 2).
“If we held a minute of silence for everyone that lost their life in the Holocaust, we would be silent for eleven years” - Unkown. Elie Wiesel decided to write about his experiences during the Holocaust resulting in the book Night. Elie was one of 11 million people that were targeted. From 1933 to 1945 millions of Jewish people were dehumanized and treated like everything but a human being. After the Holocaust, it was discovered that 6 million Jews were killed.
How did the execrable setting, the concentration camps, alter those involved? Good people were manipulated and changed into performing heinous acts. “Night,” is written from the perspective of Eliezer, as he navigated through the survival of the Holocaust, with his father. Eli became aware that people who neglected their morals thrived, this revelation troubled him deeply. The inhumane atrocities that took place during the Holocaust resulted in corrupt mindsets among those involved: the German soldiers, the Jews and Eliezer himself.
By saying this the author explained how evil, and unjust the SS officers were to the prisoners. This explains how the Nazi soldiers treated the Jews, and that they had no regard for how they
This book explains the perils of indifference by telling us about how much the Jews suffered and the fact that no one felt the need to act upon these abhorrent actions by the Nazis immediately. This marks the point where I will begin talking about Elie Wiesel’s book Night and how it drives
Many lives were lost during the German’s attempt to wipe out all Jews, and those who lived lost a part of their life during this time. The young boys lost their childhood and ‘innocences’. They witness more death and suffering than anywhere in the country. Today, there is still death and violence against others.
Elie Wiesel’s true story Night, is an intriguing story about the Holocaust. The guards and even veteran prisoners are cruel to others. The punishments, even for tiny faults, are unthinkably horrid. Man does not care how old or weak someone is; this makes the children and teens change and act inhumane towards other prisoners, even towards their own family. It clearly, and painfully, explains man’s inhumanity to man.
Are you just going to live the rest of your life in misery doing what the Nazi ’s tell you to do? Throughout Nazi rule prisoners had to obey the soldiers in concentration camps. But that doesn’t mean you can’t step out of line and show defiance. In the article “Resistance during the Holocaust”, it talks about the resistance in the Extermination Camps and how “a small number of prisoners managed to escape during the struggle” (14).
It’s difficult to imagine the way humans brutally humiliate other humans based on their faith, looks, or mentality but somehow it happens. On the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, he gives the reader a tour of World War Two through his own eyes , from the start of the ghettos all the way through the liberation of the prisoners of the concentration camps. This book has several themes that develop throughout its pages. There are three themes that outstand from all the rest, these themes are brutality, humiliation, and faith. They’re the three that give sense to the reading.
In Night one of the ways that the Jews were dehumanized was by abuse. There were beatings, “I never felt anything except the lashes of the whip... Only the first really hurt.” (Wiesel, 57) “They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs.
These men were not punished or harmed for their inability to execute the killings. In fact, once they transferred out, they were not burdened with the lifetime guilt of killing thousands of innocent people, as were their younger comrades. In Ordinary Men, Browning provides an excellent analysis of showing how a working man from the middle class, can be transformed into a mass murderer through peer pressure and the desire to follow orders of their superiors. The Holocaust was one of the most devastating and brutal massacres in modern history, executed by people who previously lived normal lives.
After going through so much, many people do not have the same mindset as they did before. Being tortured and watching others being tortured changes a person’s life, especially Elie’s, his father’s, Moshe the Beadle’s, and Rabbi Eliahou’s. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, shares his own experience of going through a concentration camp, and it is clear that many things in his life changed
On April 11, 1945, Harry J. Herder Jr. and his company discovered one of the many secret horrors of World War II that dotted the European landscape; the Buchenwald concentration camp. The battle hardened man who had seen his fair share of death and human suffering surveyed the camp with a sinking feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. Before his eyes lay human beings so starved they could not pick themselves up off of their bunks, children who had never seen the outside of the camp fence, partially clothed bodies and shaved heads. Shocked and disgusted, Harry J. Herder Jr. and two of his comrades then took a deeper tour of the camp. Eerie, and abandoned by the German soldiers lay the “medical rooms” with human organs floating in jars of liquid and the gallows where unruly prisoners were hung.
148) Briefly mentioned earlier was young Bruno’s little knowledge about the terrible times happening right under his nose. ‘Auschwitz’ or as known to Bruno as the farm was a concertation camp were Shmuel and many other Jews lived. Neither of the boys didn’t know what a concentration camp was, this made the readers curious and not so sure themselves, which then hooked them in even more. The age of the children played a big part in this and in Bruno’s case the lies his family was telling him.