I was sixteen years old when I was first confronted with tangible evidence of evil as I looked through a glass wall at the severed braids of Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. I had heard stories about the Holocaust in school and saw pictures of camp survivors prior to arriving, but as tears covered my cheeks I realized that dry recitals of facts and frozen images were completely inadequate to convey the depth of suffering experienced in that place. Nothing could have prepared me to see hundreds of neatly labelled suitcases which were never intended to reach their destinations or to walk into shower rooms and imagine the screams of children my age as they choked on poison gas. I looked at the German students visiting the memorial with me and realized that the “monsters” who had been at work during the Third Reich, the grandparents of many of my friends, were people just like me. I was unable to comprehend the type of hatred that could drive thousands of otherwise “normal” individuals to systematically isolate, torture, and seek to eradicate an entire ethnic group. The vague interest I previously had in human behavior transformed into a driving passion to discover why people do the things they do – a passion that lingers with me today as I observe …show more content…
Theories describing social stratification and data documenting inequality became vividly relevant to me as I watched police in riot gear confronting angry African American protestors in a city just miles from my home. As my initial shock faded I decided to take advantage of my last years as an undergraduate student to break down the false impressions I had developed through years of “colorblind”
When one looks through the history of the last century, many great atrocities can come to mind. However, the one that is the most common is that of the Holocaust during World War II. People often wonder how something like this could have been allowed to happen. These same people wonder this without realizing that something similar has happened, right within their own shores. Not only this, but they do not realize how previously close we could become to having this happen again.
Have you ever wondered how 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazi’s without the world ever knowing? During World War II, millions of Jews in Europe were gathered up and shipped to concentration camps. In these camps, Jews were forced to do work, while death was the only other option. A man by the name of Eliezer Wiesel explains his own experience of living in a few different concentration camps inside his well known book Night. The Nazi’s didn’t care about their prisoners and dehumanized them in these concentration camps.
The Holocaust is one of the most darkened events in human history, as it serves as a horrible event that took place 80 years ago. It stands as a chilling reminder of unchecked bigotry and intolerance of humans across the years and how a supreme leader can influence hatred in the souls of others. In the book ‘Night’, Eliezer Wiesel endured physical and mental pain while he was living in the camp. He was treated inhumanely like the rest of the inmates in Auschwitz who had lived there for years. This event shattered families across the nation, leaving permanent scars for generations to come, Elie was one of the millions of people who were affected by this event, and he bravely shared his memoir of some of the horrifying instances that he endured
Has it ever dawned upon you how a twelve year old boy might have experienced the Holocaust? In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Mr. Wiesel told his story, leaving us with an astonishing and vehement view to what it was like to be sent to a concentration camp at the young age of twelve. To enhance the powerful effect of the book, a multitude of motifs were utilized, although one was undeniably conspicuous: The dehumanization of the Jews. The book was a full chronicle of one young man’s experience of the Holocaust, which included multifarious occurrences of the horrors Jewish prisoners were put through, ultimately removing the essence of their humanity. Symbolism was incorporated into this motif, in which Mr. Wiesel showed how one’s eyes not
Walking around West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Mo., the past nighttime, seeing the moderate retreat of that evening's dispute walk, I was sharply clobbered by a racial generalization that hit me right in my social heart.
Introduction When I first began reading Eliezer Wiesel’s book Night I could not help but think about how someone that had suffered so much is able to write a book about what they lived through in the holocaust death camps as a teenager. When you think “teenager” you think rebellious, snotty and maybe even immature, you would never, in a thousand years, think about a teenager having to arrive with their family to the place where they will never see each other again because they are separated and sent to gas chambers. After watching the video Oprah and Elie Wiesel at Auschwitz, I’m still in disbelief about the fact that having undergone through so much pain and misery, to say the least, Elierzer says that he “had anger but never hate” for his
Over six million Jews, handicapped, and ‘different’ people were executed in Hitler’s murder spree. In Elie Wiesel’s novel Night, the author paints an image for the reader of what an unimaginable, first-hand experience of the Holocaust was like: starvation, abuse, inhumanity. Night is just one example that proves that inhumanity can cause anyone to become evil because the cruelty can morph them into a barbaric individual, who lacks a sense of identity. Inhumanity can alter anything and anyone into something cruel because it can cause them to lose their identity. For example, in “Zimbardo- Stanford Prison Experiment” by
Every day teenagers face about 35,000 obstacles, and all of them affect an aspect in their lives. In modern lives, one obstacle may be getting through the school day without being teased, but in a concentration camp back in the 1940’s, it would be if they would make it through the day. This time period was called the Holocaust, and millions of people were killed in labor camps, and death camps. Some people might say that this was so long ago, and doesn’t really matter, because it doesn't affect our everyday lives. Well, maybe it doesn't now, but back then children were ripped away from their families with their goodbyes still locked away in their mouths, and murdered, just because they had different beliefs.
The resistance of the Holocaust has claimed worldwide fame at a certain point in history, but the evidence that the evil-doers themselves left crush everything that verifies the fantasy of the Holocaust. For an example, in Poland, the total Jewish population of over thirty-three hundred thousand suddenly plummeted to three hundred thousand. Ten percent of the population survived the Holocaust in Poland. Almost every country that the Nazis have conquered has the same percent of survival as Poland. In Elie Wiesel Wiesel’s memoir Night, the activities in the concentration camps, the suffering of Jews, and the disbelief of the inhumane actions of the Nazis result in making people resist the truth.
More protest were brought to the surface of the world after the shooting of an unarmed African American boy after he robbed the local convenience store in Ferguson Missouri, shot by a White police officer Darren Wilson, while confronting the African American boy Michael Brown Jr (Clarke, 2014). The response to the shooting went directly towards an automatic prejudice response of the police officer being racist towards Michael giving him no chance to surrender without need of weapon discharge. After the death and protest people created shirts stating “Racism is not over, but I’m over racism”, this shirt was created as a memorial shirt for the death of Michael Brown. This form of memorial seems more of a form of attention and a way to bring money into those people's pockets to which created the shirt. The pre judgement of the shooting being
WW2 took the lives of more than 72.4 million people, ("11 Facts About the Holocaust.") and killed more than two-thirds of all the people living in Europe at the time, ("World War 2 Statistics."). As part of their service to their country, the Nazis were commanded to perform horrific actions any reasonable person would question. These tortures included, “putting people’s hands in boiling water until the skin and fingernails came off...pulling teeth and cutting and twisting off the ears; running electric current through the victims…” ("Nazi Torture and Medical Experimentation.") “Prisoners were submerged in ice water to see the effects of hypothermia, injected with chemicals and poisons to test their effectiveness, sterilized, vivisected, and operated on without anesthetic,” (Smallwood). When many of these prominent Nazi soldiers were put on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, they argued they were serving their country, following orders from their superior. Here, we confront the thought-provoking question of whether it is just to obey your superior or serve your nation while breaking the moral code of humanity. These Nazis committed acts and imposed punishments upon their prisoners, that many have labeled as sinister, inhumane, unjust, and gruesome. But can we blame them for following the demands of their superiors and their country? Is it
The concentration camps from World War II are part of a painful and tragic incident that we have learned about in school for many years. And while we are taught the facts, we may not fully understand the emotional impact it had upon the humans involved. Upon reading Night by Elie Wiesel, readers are given vivid descriptions of the gruesome and tragic behaviors that the Jews were forced to endure inside he treacherous concentration camps. Among all of the cruelties that the Jews were exposed to, a very significant form of the callous behaviors was the demoralization of the prisoners. Each inmate was given a tattoo of a number, and that tattoo became their new identity within the camp. Every prisoner was presented with tattered uniforms that became
The dictionary defines terror and genocide as ‘an extreme fear’ and ‘the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation” respectably. Within these parameters, it is suitable to state that the terrors the governments of Germany and Russia forced some of their citizens to endure are nothing less than acts of genocide. Between 1933 and 1949, over six million Jewish people from Germany and Europe perished in Nazi Concentration Camps during the Holocaust. In Stalin’s Russia, between four million and seventy million Russians departed from the Earth within the Soviet Gulags. Within these figures, there are over eighty million souls and eighty million individual experiences and stories that will never be told. Mikihal Bulgakov wrote, ‘manuscripts don’t burn,’ and following that, it could be said that ‘the voices of people do not die.’ Faint as they may be, the voices of the dead can be heard when one attempts to listen hard enough. Through the examination of memoirs of the survivors, it is possible to gain understanding into the lives of those who perished in these concentration camps. This essay will work to understand how in the moments before their murders, and disposal of their vessels within the Soviet Gulags and the Nazi Concentration Camps, lead to the dehumanization of the prisoners that perished within these camps.
Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish
Coming from a Jewish background with family lineage traced back to Europe and North Africa the stories of the Holocaust have been shared to me since my childhood. Even though human suffering, indiscriminate hate, and mass murder is difficult to comprehend for anyone who hasn’t directly lived it, ensuring these accounts are retold is at the upmost importance. Considering that a previous generation of my family had lost their human identity - as they became the number tattooed on their arm -it’s a miracle that I’m able to live in a nation where the value of coexistence is held at such a high level. In my community people are united by their differences. To this day the inadequate response the world had shown against the force of evil hunts me and reinforces “Never Again” in every fiber of my body.