Bear Witness Holocaust

Many people have learned about the Holocaust throughout the years, but learning about it from a primary source is a whole different experience. A scary journey that turned out to be the Holocaust has been told by two individuals that survived. These two stories tell the reader what life was like and what they went through. Even though the conditions were terrible, both Eli and Lina were able to survive and break away through fear, horrendous experiences, and hope that lead them to surviving and leaving people they cared about behind. Night, by Eli Wiesel and Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys takes the reader through a journey that they will end up remembering for the rest of their lives.

When asking anyone what the Holocaust is, there is a very standard answer as to what it was. It is infamously known as the mass killings and imprisonment of Jewish people throughout most of Western Europe. What people fail to acknowledge is that there is more to the Holocaust than this “standard answer.” There have been multiple accounts of what it was like to be in the Holocaust such as the famous books The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and Night by Elie Wiesel. The memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal serves the same purpose as any text about this atrocity has served: to inform the public about what truly went on in the concentration camps and beyond. However, A Lucky Child provides a different perspective on the Holocaust. As the title indicates, it is a book about how Buergenthal was able to outlast the most infamous concentration camp: Auschwitz. It is an inspiring story and puts the reader into perspective about all the children who had been killed during the Holocaust, yet he had survived.

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.

Religious wars fought over beliefs were always fought between two sides and one is thought to have a winner and a loser victor and victim. In Elie Wiesel’s Noble speech “Hope, Despair, and Memory” he describes his experiences during a religious war that were more of an overpowering of people than a war no clash of metal, no hard fought fight, just the rounding up and killing of people with different beliefs that barely put up a fight. Elie Wiesel the author of the Noble lecture “Hope, Despair, and Memory” implores us to respond to the human suffering and injustice that happened in the concentration camps by remembering the past, so that the past cannot taint the future through his point of view, cultural experiences, as well as his use of rhetorical appeals.

The Holocaust was a tragic event that killed and scarred millions. It is of the common misconception that only Jews were scarred by The Holocaust, however, the reality is that anyone that did not fit the expectation of Hitler perceived to be of a correct breed was killed, exiled, or imprisoned. Although this was a tragic and turning point of history, many claim it should not be taught in schools. The Holocaust is a great lesson for the entire world to learn from, and particularly a lesson for the next generation to learn from the mistakes of the past and make sure that they are never repeated again (Why teach The Holocaust?). The Holocaust should be taught to students in schools because it presents decisions that, in the future, may need to be made or even ones that should not have been made, it allows students to see how history could repeat itself, and it instills a sense of appreciation for the freedoms and inclusiveness that we have in our time.

In Night, Elie Wiesel survives an attempted genocide many have heard of but few truly known, the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel doesn’t know how he survived saying, “I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself,” (p. vii). However, he knows his survival and testimony has placed him as a, “witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory,” (p. viii). What follows is a summary of Elie’s auto-biography Night that seeks to answer whether or not it is effective as a witness of the Holocaust; a comparison of the power of one voice versus statistics; and an inquiry as to what extent this account of individuals struggling to survive impacts

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night. He has a very specific message in his book that many of us can learn from. Elie Wiesel wrote Night to show that the silence and hesitation surrounding the Holocaust is was what allowed it to occur and continue for as long as it did,

Every life knows tragedy. While some tragedies may be greater than others, it is tragedy all the same. In his book Night, Elis Wiesel brings light to one of the most tragic events in our history The Holocaust. Wiesel describes his torturous treatment in the concentration camps, a place which stole everything from him: his home, his family, and even his faith in God. After seeing people tortured, gassed, and burned, Wiesel states, “my eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in the world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger”

There is a set time frame between life and death. Once the line is crossed, there is no return. This is why Elie Wiesel feels it is so important to bear witness. Bearing witness is to be a constant observer, to consider all possibilities, and to act when it is time. Elie Wiesel wrote his memoir Night so people could learn to act when it is necessary. These mistakes would eventually cost the many Jewish people their lives. They could have changed all of this by making connections between what people are telling them and possible outcomes. People do not make the choice to bear witness to something until it becomes personal, and by that time it is too late.

“Why dwell upon the study of the Holocaust when history is loaded with other tragedies? Because the Holocaust was unique. This is not to say that other tragedies were less horrible, only that the Holocaust was different and should not be compared and trivialized,” the author noted (Tarnor Wacks 9). A mere 71 years ago a defining feature of world history took place, in concentration camps across Eastern and Western Europe. 6 million Jews were ripped out of their homes and ultimately murdered. It is imperative that we remember the Holocaust because the magnitude of this tragedy is astronomical and shouldn’t be forgotten.

In a span of 10 years, the Holocaust killed over 7 million people, that’s just as much as the population of Hong Kong. In the book Night, by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel shares his experience on how he survived the Holocaust and what he went through. How he dealt with the horrors and even to how he felt of his dad’s death and how he saw himself after it was all over. As he tried to publish it he was constantly turned down due to the fact of how horrid and truful it was. He still tried and tried until it was finally published. This book shows how the Holocaust should be taught and not be forgotten, due to it being a prime example of human impureness. Humans learn off trial and error, how the Jewish population was affected, decrease in moral, and the unsettled tension are prime examples of such mistakes.

It is a common assumption among numerous people in the world that the Holocaust never existed. In fact, almost fifty percent of the world population never even heard of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel helped people around the world learn about the Holocaust through his book “Night.” He wanted people to see the bravery, courage, and guilt of the Jews through his book. “Night” shows the horrific and malicious acts in the German concentration camps during the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel successfully created a clever plot consisting of dialogue, introspection and dynamic characters to make his story realistic and compelling. Elie WIesel changed the protagonist Eliezer, an observant Jewish youngster, that strived to delve deeper into the mythical traditions of his religion, changed to a person that questions God’s greatness, a disloyal son and a person that only seeks personal gain.

Escape from Camp 14 is a bibliography about the main character Shin and how he managed to be one of the first civilians to successfully escape from a Political Camp. As Shin was growing up, he had to face terrible living conditions in Camp 14. Food was always hard to come by, so Shin often survived by eating insects and rats.North Korea is known for their many abominations to humanity. The country is also known for their communist political make up that has abused all of the North Korean people since World War 2. Food shortages, media bans, torture, and political camps are some of the major issues that are going on in North Korea today, and their dictatorship is the cause of it all.

The Holocaust, a mass genocide and torture resulting in the death of millions, was a historic event unlike any other. A survivor of this atrocious incident, Elie Wiesel, went on to write of his experiences in the novel “Night”, and later on would write of how these events changed him in his essay “A God Who Remembers”. By reading these works and hearing of Wiesel’s experiences, one can learn of the importance of trying to understand others. This is made clear through both the hardships of Elie Wiesel’s life, and the lessons he learned from them.

The Holocaust was a horrific tragedy which started in January of 1933 and ended in May of 1945, the Holocaust was the mass murder of millions of people. The word was derived from the Greek word that meant Sacrifice to the Gods (Steele 7), also called the Shoan which is the Hebrew word for catastrophe (Steele 7). So many countries took place in this 12-year genocide, including, “Germany, Italy, Japan, Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria, which were also known as the Axis Powers” (Steele 34). But, although there were all those countries they were all part of one larger group called the Nazis, were the ones who were killing all the different denominations of people. (Bachrach 58). All of this led to the gigantic catastrophe called the Holocaust. The