Peter Gay's Memoir, My German Question

How would you feel if you had to be worrying about the Nazi´s taking you away for being Jewish? Or living in a Nazi controlled area? In the book Black Radishes by Susan Lynn Meyer, Gustave lived in Paris with his parents and hung out with his cousins/friends Marcel and Jean-Paul everyday until the Nazis came and Gustave and his parents moved to the unoccupied zone where he worries about his family still in the occupied zone. At the end, his family finally moves to the United States fleeing from Nazi-controlled Paris. The author uses description, tone, and revealing actions to demonstrate the goal of setting up the problem.

Many Germans, during WWII had started to take on the ideology of Hitler – that Jewish citizens in Germany were the cause of their poverty and misfortune. Of course, many knew that this was merely a form of scapegoating, and although they disagreed with the majority of Germany’s citizens, many would not speak up for fear of isolation (Boone,

The Holocaust was a dreadful and truly awful time period, people were dehumanized, and shamed into losing their faith while they experienced tragic and awful death and pain. One Jewish survivor documents his experiences with death in his memoir, ‘Night’, Elie Wiesel. The novel is filled with his tales of death, dehumanization, and faith throughout the concentration camp, Auschwitz. In Auschwitz, the Jews lost their innocence that they once had. In the novel, Night, Elie, his father, and his fellow Jews lost their innocence through dehumanization, loss of faith, and experience of death and violence.

Prior to the Holocaust, labels were made on the Jewish legally. The German government ratified the Nuremberg Laws, a series of laws released gradually, increasing with labels and discrimination each time. The gradual ramping of labels and discrimination nullified the blow and made it noticeable only to those enforcing them and the Jews being discriminated against. The laws show the progression of labels into discrimination by first broadening the identification of Jews as those practicing Judaism to “anyone… descended from at least three grandparents who were fully Jewish” (NSDAP 2.5.1). The laws continued by taking away “full political rights in accordance with the provision of the law” (NSDAP 1.2.3).

Adolf hitler set up concentration camps to work jew to death or kill them right when they got there by making them “Shower” which was a gas chamber that killed them. At any point the nazi soldiers would accuse the jews for doing something they did not do so they sent them to a camp far worse than the one there were at “Convicted of forgery, aiding the enemy and attempted escape, the sisters were sent to separate prisons. Then in December 1943 Anita was told she was being moved to Auschwitz. She was aware what that meant. “You knew about the gas chambers in Auschwitz long before one was in Auschwitz,” Anita told me.”

Many actions played out during the Holocaust and World War II were not humane, and still remind us like a scream behind closed doors: hidden but still heard. While hearing the horrid stories and seeing the ghoulish photos of times not to be forgotten, we see the tragedy that is the mistreatment of human lives. Our identities are lost little by little, but those victims had theirs ripped from their bodies. After losing everything and then becoming a nearly empty vessel, it is amazing that we attempt to comprehend the cruelty of the Holocaust. The loss of identity and self might have started with Adolf Hitler’s reign, for the Holocaust legacies, but we are all losing bits of ourselves constantly.

The Truth About Many Jews Ellie Wiesel once said, “Without Passion, without haste.” The people in this true story were all treated like they were so much less than everyone else in the world. None of them had names that they went by anymore they just went by being called stupid Jews by the people who ran the camps. The things that had happened to these people were so unbelieveable. Millions of Jews were forced to cut their hair and were compared to dogs, or even sometimes called dogs.

Retaining one’s virtue whilst living in Nazi Germany is challenging,

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.

Through character’s hope and perseverance in his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel conveys the theme that the love one holds for another is what fuels their will survive under strain. The Jews displacement by the Nazi’s downgraded them from their homes to filthy, plague-ridden, sewer like boxes of concrete that was Auschwitz. As a result of this many forgot their purpose to be alive. Wiesel shows that the need to survive those conditions was only supported by a sense of duty to one’s family to be there. When Stein says “Were it not for them, I would give up,”(45) he shows that their survival is the only thing keeping him upright.

In which millions of Jews were innocently killed and persecuted because of their religion. As a student who is familiar with the years of the holocaust that will forever live in infamy, Wiesel’s memoir has undoubtedly changed my perspective. Throughout the text, I have been emotionally touched by the topics of dehumanization, the young life of Elie Wiesel, and gained a better understanding of the Holocaust. With how dehumanization was portrayed through words, pondering my mind the most.

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

The guest speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum posed an unanswerable question to the dozen Chabad eighth-grade boys sitting in front of him. Mitchell Winthrop, 88 years of age, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Mauthausen Nazi concentration camps, had been raised in a secular Jewish home in Lodz, Poland. Why had he, he asked the boys—someone who hadn’t even had a bar mitzvah—been chosen to survive the Holocaust and not his pious, white-bearded grandfather? His question was meant to provoke thought, but it also spurred the graduating class of Chicago’s Seymour J. Abrams Cheder Lubavitch Hebrew Day School into action.

In Night, one is faced with silence and negligence from the world. While being unwillingly evacuated from his home, Eliezer’s friends and neighbours stayed inside and watched as their former companions marched to their impending death. As Eliezer noted, “from behind their windows, from behind their shutters, our fellow citizens watched as we passed.’ (Eliezer Wiesel, 19) The Hungarian civilians watched in silence too naive and confused to approach the German military and help the Jewish people.

The German workmen took a lively interest in this spectacle” (105) display that the common public were cruel because they ignored Jewish persecution and even mocked it in a sense. They were bystanders. This relates to the theme because it shows how inaction can be worse than beating; because the people did not help the Jews, they forced them to endure the Holocaust. This is truly