Holocaust Quotes

During World War II, the Jewish race was one of the most persecuted of all the minorities harassed by Hitler and the Third Reich, and a day to day basis, Jews across Europe lived in constant fear, wondering if today would be their last. Especially in cities close to the expanding Nazi empire, there was no telling when their last breath would come. In the memoir, the closely knitted town of Sighet is controlled by the Germans, leaving anyone of Jewish descent to obey their commands in total fear of their personal safety. Elie Wiesel describes this genuine fear when he wakes up a close friend of his father, “‘Get up sir, get up!...You're going to be expelled from here tomorrow with your whole family, and all the rest of the Jews…’ Still half asleep he stared at me with terror-stricken eyes.”

During World War II, Hitler was putting Jewish people in concentration camps and was ultimately trying to wipe them out. Many Jewish people didn't want to believe what was happening to them. The book Night, by Elie Wiesel, shows just how many people deceived themselves to continue to have hope. Many Jewish people believed things would get better, and didn't actually believe that things could very well get worse. By having this deception, they didn't think ahead to what could happen to them or how bad things could turn out for them. The Jews showed self-deception by not believing Moshies warnings, when they were forced to give up some of their everyday rights, and by having false optimism when they had to move to the ghettos.

Not even a year later nearly every right of the Jewish people was eliminated, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were killed or tortured.

“In a few seconds, we had ceased to be men” (PG.36). Elie is a jewish boy from Transylvania and is taken to Auschwitz where he is separated from his mother and sister. His father and Elie are moved the the concentration camp called “Buna” and spend most of their time there. They then had to be evacuated to Gleiwitz, where they ran about 42 miles to get there. They spent about 3 days there and then they were transported to Buchenwald by train. There they are rescued by Americans and a resistance part that attacked the camp. Sadly Elie’s father dies in Buchenwald due to a sickness and being sent to the crematory. Dehumanization of the Jewish people in “Night” ,by Elie Wiesel, happened in a variety of ways and helped Hitler achieve his ideas about Jewish people.

One resident exclaims “What an imagination he has,” (Wiesel 4-5). This sheds some light on why the people of Sighet don’t trust Moshe’s word, and classifies him as a mad man, but still does not give enough justification for his word to go completely ignored. If the townsfolk did some investigating and found all the foreigners dead or if the news reported it, a number of the Jews would have fled Sighet in fear of genocide, but this incident goes unseen. This transits to the next subject on how The Jews tend to trifle news that is given to them.

After being accused they were being hanged and killed for no reason like the holocaust

People can only imagine the terrors that the Jews and other ethnic groups had to go through during the Holocaust in World War II. With Anne Frank’s diary, people can finally put themselves into the scene and captivate all the feelings and sentiments that Anne Frank has poured onto the pages. Anne Frank, her family, and their friends were known for hiding from the German Nazis in the Secret Annex for two years from 1942-1944. Innocent and naive,

After a short time, Hitler put restrictions on the Jews so they could feel like even less of a human. "After May 1940 the good times were few and far between: first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews. Our freedom was severely restricted by a series of anti-Jewish decrees: Jews were required to wear a yellow star; Jews were required to turn in their bicycles; Jews were forbidden to use trams; Jews were forbidden to ride in cars, even their own; Jews were required to do their shopping between 3.00 and 5.00 p.m.; Jews were required to frequent only Jewish-owned barbershops and beauty salons; Jews were forbidden to be out on the streets between 8.00 p.m. and 6.00 a.m.; Jews were forbidden to go to theatres, cinemas or any other forms of entertainment; Jews were forbidden to use swimming pools, tennis

The Jews of Sighet were of disproving failure to anticipate Nazi terrorism in reason of two factors: disbelief by doubt and ignorant fear within themselves and their community of Hitler’s extermination strategy. In Night, the author introduces his life as a teenager and his relations with Moshe the Beadle, a shtibl who would joyfully about the Kabbalah and its mysterious revelations and guide him into studying such esoteric tradition, but then drone endlessly about his abhorrent experience of being imprisoned as a deportee. Unfortunately, no matter how much he spoke of it, his words became dust as they left his mouth and had blown in “A calming, reassuring wind” (Wiesel, 6). The people of Sighet bypassed Moshe’s warning signal simply by not taking him seriously, and Wiesel verifies this expression in page 7, presuming how everyone “refused to believe his tales” and “...to listen,” which led them in believing that that “he wanted their pity...was imagining things…” and “had gone mad”. This doubt provoked the inconvenience of Moshe’s hopes to inform his people as a preliminary to an impending event. Wiesel later notes about the ignorant temper that everyone, including himself, showed towards Hitler’s upcoming massacre; they felt that they were “in the abstract” and “The Germans...[would only] stay in Budapest...For strategic...political reasons” (8). Citizens of the city facaded their apprehension of this

"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."

The Jews of Sighet have an irrational ability to deny reality. The Jews are constantly in denial, disputing any bad news that came their way. The Germans were closing in on Jews all over the country, “ Yet [the remaining Jews] were not worried. Of course [they] had heard of the fascists, but it was all in abstract. It meant nothing to [them] than a change of ministry” (Wiesel 9 emphasis added). It’s almost as if the Jews of Sighet live in their own world of denial. Up until that point, countless Jews had been deported, yet the rest still refused to see the truth. The news of fascists assaulting Jews all over the country “spread though Sighet like wildfire…[but even then] optimism soon revive” (9). Even though the Nazis have passed many edicts

against the Jewish rule to self inflict any form if bodily harm. The purpose of this was to

The silence of the Holocaust, in all of its forms wreaked havoc on the lives it encountered. Moishe the Beadle, who lived in Sighet, was one of the foreign Jews in Sighet that was forced to leave. These Jews were taken to an unknown, place. Rumors spread that they were in working in

Another reason the townspeople might not have moved was because they did not believe that Hitler's German regime could annihilate the whole Jewish population that is spread throughout so many nations.

People could not and did not believe Moishe’s story. What Moishe tells them was to mortifying to be true. Can you blame the Jews of Sighet for their thinking? Who in their right mind would think or imagine that one man could possibly obliterate an entire race. The Holocaust was such a mind boggling and out of the natural order of life. Of course no one in their right mind is going to believe that someone so spiteful, egotistical, heinous, and narcissistic would want to hurt another human being.