...Night is a memoir written by Elie Wiesel about the suffering of the Jews during the Holocaust. Night is also an autobiography account of a recollection of the Holocaust through the eyes of survivor, Elie Wiesel. He takes his readers with him from his home and beyond. After reading this book, readers will have a deeper understanding of the holocaust. “FEAR WAS GREATER THAN HUNGER” (59) Wiesel takes the reader through the events of the day. Half the group, his father among them, were at work. The group Eliezer was in stayed behind and was resting when the bombing started. All inmates were confined to their blocks. Almost in slow motion, Wiesel describes how one prisoner crawled on his belly through the deserted street to a cauldron of soup that stood unguarded in the roadway. The other prisoners look on with fear and envy, all of them consumed with hunger, at the man risking his life in quest of a little soup. When the famished man finally manages to pull himself to his feet and reaches into the cauldron, he is shot and falls dead beside it. Wiesel notes that, despite the danger to themselves from the bombing, the inmates were not afraid but glad to see the camp being bombed. “Fear was greater than hunger” this man showed mutiny and rebellion towards the SS officers just so he could survive , he put himself in danger in order to live this reason is why everyone-including the SS officers watches in disbelief as one man who dared committed suicide for a ration or two more of soup...
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...When the Holocaust started, no one believed it would be as horrid as it was. No one believed the rumors they were hearing until it was happening to them. Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and elderly people went through traumatic experiences and many were murdered in huge masses. The children of the Holocaust and the children of Holocaust survivors, however, suffered more physically and emotionally because they were given away, tortured, left alone, and put through many hardships. When the Nazis came into power in 1933, Jews were targeted from the very beginning. Laws were implemented and they had a severe impact on the lives of children. The laws restricted the number of Jewish children that could attend school, it banned children from many public...
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...The holocaust was a horrendous event where the Jewish population was persecuted and believed to be inferior to all others by Germany. Many events throughout history are similar by a race or religion being persecuted based on their beliefs; the Japanese-American Relocation was indistinguishable from the holocaust except for a few events that make them unique. The holocaust could be labeled as one of the worst acts in history; during the event “as many as 12,000 Jews were killed every day”(History). Hitler was the leader of this mass genocide believing that Jewish population were an enemy of his people and that they were a threat as a result. These ideas transpired during World War II but quickly dispersed after the war ended when Germany surrendered and Hitler committed suicide. After the bombing of Pearl-Harbor a similar event occurred....
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...Throughout the movie, "The Holocaust", the phrase, "I just do my job," was usually the only excuse most people who committed crimes against the Jews could come up with. For example, when Helena and Rudy Weiss were staying in Kiev, the city was bombed. During the bombing, one of the Nazi soldiers, who happened to be Heinz Muller, a friend of Inga's family, was hit by falling debris. Hesitant, Rudy helped Muller escape from the collapsing building, gave him some water, and asked him why he was taking part in the mistreatment of the Jews. "I obey orders," Muller replied, unrepentant about what he did. Also, when Bertha Weiss was sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, Dr. Joseph Weiss asked the Kapo what happened to her. The lady bluntly retorted, "Don't blame me, I just take orders." Whether to keep a job, remain loyal to their cause, or just because they had no other excuse, everyone used that phrase to justify what they did wrong against the Jews. Anti-Semitism and unfair grudges are two factors that can cause Genocide. During the movie, Eric Dorf claimed he did not feel bad about Kristallnacht or what happened to the Jews, because he said the Jews provoked it. Even though Kristallnacht was the first major pogrom, a government sponsored attack on the Jews, and was terribly destructive, Eric said that they killed Christ and they deserved what they got (The Holocaust). In addition, Heydrich believed that Germans and the Aryan race was superior to the Jewish race and they had to...
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...Throughout the Holocaust and World War 2, Americans tried to remain completely unbiased. They attempted to stay out of everything that was occurring in Germany and other parts of the world. However, they ended up getting dragged into all of the chaos anyways. Even though most Americans weren’t too fond of Jews, they still didn’t believe that what the Nazis were doing was right. Due to this, they strived to help the Jews by boycotting goods from Germany, hoping it’d make Hitler stop his anti-semitic policies. After that, the situation in Germany was getting worse and in effort to stop that, Roosevelt put together an international conference in hopes that he could convince other nations to take in a large number of Jewish refugees in order to save their lives. However, none of the nations were willing to take in a...
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...the ruler of Germany brainwashed the entire nation and did fulfil his promise to the Germans. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889 in a small town in Austria known as Braunau to Alois. “Hitler did not do particularly well in school, leaving formal education in 1905. Unable to settle into a regular job, he drifted. He wished to become an artist but was rejected from the Academy in Vienna.” Hitler unable to settle into a job or being rejected from the Academy in Vienna may have been the reason the Holocaust was put together. He wanted to...
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...The Pianist is a historically based film that captivates the audience with its intense, riveting scenes. The movie outlines Hitler’s policies against the Jewish race during the holocaust in the late 1930’s. It focuses on the lives of one particular Jewish family during the period in which Hitler invades and occupies the Polish community of Warsaw. The title was inspired by the career of the main character before and after the Holocaust. The film chronicles the experiences of a Jewish pianist and his survival through the Holocaust with determination and the help of others, while millions of other Jews perish. The theme is portrayed effectively throughout the movie. The merciless treatment of the Jewish people convinces the audience to empathize with the characters in the movie. The movie begins with the pianist, Szpilman, in the studio playing the piano while the community of Warsaw is being bombed. The first scene in the film is a montage of grainy black and white scenes of Polish life before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The footage shows a dated world with old European style building and technology, people are shown walking around the town in aged clothing. The grainy dated look of the film also makes the scenes appear gloomy but relaxed at the same time. These images are used to drive the notion that it is set in a time long ago, in a different era. This scene is a critical part in the film as it refines the time and emotion, in which the film is set, so the audience can relate...
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...The holocaust was a state funded persecution of over six million Jews. In 1933 the Germans believe they were racially superior to the Jews. Those who were declared inferior (Jews) were voiced as a threat to society. Most Jewish families lived in the same vicinity as the Germans which made them an easy targets for persecution. Besides from Jews, the Natzi groups even directed their hatred towards the weak which were elderly, crippled, babies, and pregnant woman. Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, as he sought to take back lost territory and ultimately rule Poland. This became Hitler’s way of waging war and introducing his very own “blitzkrieg” strategy. After conquering Poland, Hitler and his army moved towards France for a second acquisition....
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...The Theme of Identity Politics in “Paradise Now” and “Once Brothers” The two films I will be reflecting on is “Paradise Now” and “Once Brothers.” “Paradise Now” tells the story of two childhood friends from the West Bank who are recruited to participate in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv which is one of Israel’s biggest cities. Whereas “Once Brothers” tells the story of Yugoslavian basketball players who played on the Yugoslavian national basketball team and eventually were recruited to play on different NBA teams in the United States. The common theme between the two films were the identity politics during the Arab-Israeli conflict and the former Yugoslavian conflict after the disintegation of the Soviet Union. The Arab- Israeli conflict...
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...Alyssa Del Toro Hum.18-Death Professor Santos Essay Genocide Genocide was the term that came out after the Nazi’s Holocaust of World War Two, but it was not the first incident of Genocide, or the last. During the Genocide Convention that followed World War Two it was agreed amongst the world leaders that genocide would “never again” occur in the world. Time has shown that this might have been an empty promise however, and this essay will review the laws being implemented by the United Nations to help prevent genocide, arguments about why humans kill, incidents of genocide and how genocide is defined and, of course, the victims of the violent crime known as genocide. Genocide is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “[t]he deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group”. The United Nations created a much broader and in depth definition in the Genocide Convention of 1948. They state that genocide is “…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. Despite some flaws and loopholes in this definition, it covers the atrocities that occur...
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...Causes of Genocide Have you ever wondered what causes people to murder hundreds of thousands and of people? No one is for sure why genocide happens or how it gets to that point but there are many theories. Genocide can take place anywhere and everywhere causing many people to die. Stopping genocides is hard because every genocide is different. The "one evil man" view, described by Springer, is what some people believe is the cause of most genocides (41). Men like Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein may have led terrible genocides, but they couldn't have done it alone. Many times no one sees any form of warning but the person who is putting it all together has most likely done extensive planning on how they're going to carry out their mission. Hitler...
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...To justify the killing of women and children Trapp took this one step further and stated that the enemy was bombing and killing German women and children so it was justified that the battalion took the same action against the Jew, their enemy. The men assigned to Police Battalion 101 were given the choice to step out and not be part of the assignment to kill Jews. Some men chose to step out publicly while others merely evaded the assignment through other less conspicuous methods. Browning estimated that the amount of men that stepped out made up about 20 percent of the total squad of 500 men during the Józefów Massacre. The remaining 80 percent believed they were justified in killing because the Jew was their enemy and some just believed that their police career was jeopardized if they stepped out and refused the...
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...perspective of a survivor of the holocaust. In ‘The book thief’ the narrator is Death and he follows Liesel and her German family. Both explore the theme of death, with the death of he bother being used as a turning point in ‘the book thief’ for Liesel. Death in ‘Night’ is explored where it became normal to see dead bodies but all it shows the limit people go to avoid death. Death becomes a reality and a normal occurrence in Night with thousands of dying daily in Auschwitz. The theme of death is first introduced in the beginning of ‘The book thief’ as Death narrates the story. The first turning point for Liesel, the German girl that Death follows, starts with her brother dying where she steals a book. This first book will be the start of many that she steals. “With one eye open, one still in a dream, the book thief-also known as Liesel Meminger-could see without question that her younger brother, Werner, was...
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...other name” page 39 .Reading night really helped me open my eyes to the reality of the Holocaust, learning about Elie Wiesel's story changed my perspective from numbers to experiences. The amount of suffering and misery Elie and millions of other went through is unbelievable to me and truly something I admire. The vow Elie took to not publicly speak about what happened to him for 10 years is valiant, and to write is to relive each moment of those painful memories. After surviving 5 concentration camps and losing his family, faith and most importantly his identity and...
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...How accurate is it to say that the persecution of Jews in Germany steadily increased in the years 1933-42? The question of whether or not the persecution of Jewish race has had a steady intensification, relates closely to whether you adopt an intentionalist or structuralist viewpoint on this historical event. An intentionalist will claim that the process of persecuting Jews in Germany is a planned sequence and was outlined by the Nazi Party; they claim that the roots of Hitler’s politics was about eliminating the Jewish race from Germany and the evidence can be found in Mein Kampf. On the other hand, structuralist historians will claim that the persecution of the Jews was never planned and it was improvised all the way through to the Holocaust; furthermore, they will state that the Nazi’s did not come to power based on policies towards the Jews as the electorate was never as enthusiastic as Hitler was about this.Although it increased it was more gradual than steady, It did increase but there were times where it stopped, but it was at a very low key when not much attention was taken towards the situation. However, in 1938 when the Nazi’s had invaded Austria and Sudetenland, there was more of an increase in persecution of Jews. In the year 1933, the Boycott of Jewish businesses and professional offices, the exclusion of Jews from civil service as well as the Quota for non-Aryan students occurred serving the purpose of isolating the Jews from the Aryan race. Reasons for such...
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