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Personal experiences of racism
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Recently, a 38 year old woman named, Jennifer Teege, discovered that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the sadistic Nazi who was commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland and the person who killed more than 8,000 Jews. When Teege was going through depression, she tried doing psychological research at a library, which coincidently, was where she found her biological mother’s book called, "I Have to Love My Father, Don't I?". After realizing this discovery, she could not phantom the fact that she was related to this “monster”. Sometimes, she questions if whether or not she has any traits of him, but learned to accept her history and that they are both two very different people. Throughout Teege’s years, she was born to a Nigerian father who was a student which her mother had an affair with. Since her mother had a lot of work to do, she took Teege to Salberg House, a Catholic home for infants in suburban Munich. She was taken care of for about 3 years, but was adopted and was not able to see her mother until age 21. Now, Teege still sets out to discover more about her family’s history and even wrote books about it as well. In addition, she hopes to find her true identity and expresses that life should not be lived in the past. …show more content…
The hatred and wars of one another’s has brought death upon millions of Jews and billions of souls. Knowing that you’re related to a merciless individual isn’t easy to accept. However, although Teege was shocked and saddened by this discovery, she used this motivation to find out her true past. Needless to say, from all things she learned, she now had a better understanding of her family and acquired great valuable lessons. Consequently, she explains how her future opened up as well. She used her stories to write books that inspired many. Sometimes, it isn’t what others make of you, but what you make of
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
The Silber Medal winning biography, “Surviving Hitler," written by Andrea Warren paints picture of life for teenagers during the Holocaust, mainly by telling the story of Jack Mandelbaum. Avoiding the use of historical analysis, Warren, along with Mandelbaum’s experiences, explains how Jack, along with a few other Jewish and non-Jewish people survived.
In his memoir, Night, author Elie Wiesel describes the horrors he experienced during the Holocaust. One prominent theme throughout the work is the evolution of human relationships within the camp, specifically between fathers and sons. While they are marching between camps, Elie speaks briefly with Rabbi Eliahu, who lost sight of his son on the long journey. Elie says he has not seen the rabbi’s son, but after Rabbi Eliahu leaves, he remembers seeing the son. He realizes that the rabbi’s son did not lose track of his father but instead purposefully ran ahead thinking it would increase his chances of survival. Elie, who has abandoned nearly all of his faith in God, cannot help but pray, saying, “ ‘ Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done’ ” (Wiesel 91). In this moment, his most fervent hope is that he will remain loyal to his father and not let his selfishness overcome his dedication to his father. However, he is soon no longer able to maintain this hope.
Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish people’s outlook on life. Wiesel’s identity transformed dramatically throughout the narrative. “How old he had grown the night before! His body was completely twisted, shriveled up into itself. His eyes were petrified, his lips withered, decayed.
The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden. Elie Wiesel shows that the relationship with his father was the strength that kept the young boy alive, but was also the major weakness.
The Holocaust survivor Abel Herzberg has said, “ There were not six million Jews murdered; there was one murder, six million times.” The Holocaust is one of the most horrific events in the history of mankind, consisting of the genocide of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped and many others during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of Nazi Germany, and his army of Nazis and SS troops carried out the terrible proceedings of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi death camps, and suffers a relentless “night” of terror and torture in which humans were treated as animals. Wiesel discovers the “Kingdom of Night” (118), in which the history of the Jewish people is altered. This is Wiesel’s “dark time of life” and through his journey into night he can’t see the “light” at the end of the tunnel, only continuous dread and darkness. Night is a memoir that is written in the style of a bildungsroman, a loss of innocence and a sad coming of age. This memoir reveals how Eliezer (Elie Wiesel) gradually loses his faith and his relationships with both his father (dad), and his Father (God). Sickened by the torment he must endure, Wiesel questions if God really exists, “Why, but why should I bless him? Because he in his great might, had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? (67). Throughout the Holocaust, Wiesel’s faith is not permanently shattered. Although after his father dies, his faith in god and religion is shaken to the core, and arguably gone. Wiesel, along with most prisoners, lose their faith in God. Wiesel’s loss of religion becomes the loss of identity, humanity, selfishness, and decency.
In his memoir “Night”, Elie Wiesel recalls his experience leading up to, in the middle of, and immediately following his forced servitude during the Holocaust. One of the most remarkable parts of Wiesel’s story is the dehumanization that occurs over the course of his imprisonment. In a system built to take away the identity of its subjects, Elie constantly grapples with his sense of self during the Holocaust and even finds himself lost by the end of the book. This loss of innocence and selfhood is a key element of Elie’s physical, emotional, and spiritual journey throughout the story.
By means of comic illustration and parody, Art Spiegelman wrote a graphic novel about the lives of his parents, Vladek and Anja, before and during the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s Maus Volumes I and II delves into the emotional struggle he faced as a result of his father’s failure to recover from the trauma he suffered during the Holocaust. In the novel, Vladek’s inability to cope with the horrors he faced while imprisoned, along with his wife’s tragic death, causes him to become emotionally detached from his son, Art. Consequently, Vladek hinders Art’s emotional growth. However, Art overcomes the emotional trauma his father instilled in him through his writing.
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
Mr. Wiesel had intended this book to describe a period of time in his life that had been dark and sorrowful. This novel is based on a survivor of the greatest Holocaust in history, Eliezer Wiesel and his journey of being a Jew in 1944. The journey had started in Sighet, Transylvania, where Elie spent his childhood. During the Second World War, Germans came to Elie and his family’s home town. They brought with them unnecessary evil and despair to mankind. Shortly after young Elie and thousands of other Jews were forced from their habitats and torn from their rights of being human. They were sent to different concentration camps. Elie and his family were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp. It would be the last time Elie sees his mother and little sister, Tzipora. The first sights of Auschwitz were terrifying. There were big flames coming from the burning of bodies and the crematoriums. The Jews had no idea of what to expect. They were not told what was about to happen to them. During the concentration camp, there was endless death and torture. The Jews were starved and were treated worse than cattle. The prisoners began to question their faith in God, wondering why God himself would
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed…“(Wiesel 32) Livia-Bitton Jackson wrote a novel based on her personal experience, I Have Lived a Thousand Years. Elli was a Holocaust victim and her only companion was her mother. Together they fought for hunger, mistreatment and more. By examining the themes carefully, the audience could comprehend how the author had a purpose when she wrote this novel. In addition, by seeing each theme, the audience could see what the author was attacking, and why. By illustrating a sense of the plight of millions of Holocaust victims, Livia-Bitton Jackson explores the powerful themes of one’s will to survive, faith, and racism.
Schwartz, Leslie. Surviving the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: a teenage struggle toward freedom from hatred.. S.l.: Lit Verlag, 2013. Print.
“‘If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.’” ― Anne Frank (“Children During the Holocaust” 5). In Lodz, Poland, the Nazis had reduced a Jewish population of more than 220,000 to almost less than 1,000 (“Hidden Children: Quest for Family” 2). Families during the Holocaust were treated so badly that being Jewish for some Jewish children had come to symbolize persecution while Christianity symbolized security (“Hidden Children: Quest For Family” 3). And, another frequent problem of the separation of the family was a child's inability in later life to form effective bonds (“Separation from the Family” 12). The Holocaust was something people could only imagine. Families were split apart, loved ones were
I was privileged to know some of my maternal great-grandparents, my gentile great-grandparents, although one of them died shortly before my birth. I never had the chance to know any of my paternal great-grandparents, my Jewish great-grandparents. They were taken from me. I am not alone in my grief. Every Jew has lost family and friends in the Holocaust, which we call the Shoah, the calamity. Despite this deep-rooted ancestral pain, the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish trauma, although Jews were its most numerous victims. Yet Amis chooses to write almost exclusively about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, which is something that a gentile cannot remotely understand or relate to. The passage recounting the story of the bomb baby was especially horrifying to read from the perspective of an irreverent goy. Reading about Jews being “picked up” (Amis 141) from a mass grave, being brought to life with carbon monoxide, and eventually crammed together in their hiding place, behind a removable panel in a cloth factory, while the secondary consciousness of a Nazi doctor looks on with concern, was frankly disturbing. Time’s Arrow is not a new and enthralling retelling of the Holocaust. It is the desecration of the murder of my
Thrown into circumstances not yet prepared for, Yehuda, his older sister Lala, and his mother, overcame many life threatening situations after Yehuda’s father was executed. Prior to the war, Nir’s father was a well-to-do business man, who provided greatly for his family. They were often seen as a true symbol of the Jewish wealth in Poland. This symbol became a target in 1939 as German, anti-Jewish, Nazi’s invaded Poland to start the beginning of World War II. “Going from a well-to-do family to refugees in the matter on a couple days was a disturbing change” (Nir 14). These changes would become the norm as the family was moved into a new apartment, sharing it with a German official. A week after the war started, a group of Nazi’s raided Jewish homes, taking Jewish men. Yehuda’s father said goodbye, naïve to what was happening. Yeahuda secretly followed the Nazi’s and watched as the hand-cuffed men, his own father and uncle among them, were shot down in the woods outside the city. Stunned, and unable to comprehend, Nir retrieved back to his home to share the news with his mother and sister. “My Mother became the backbone of the family; A role she would maintain throughout much of the war. I sensed an attitude of determination in her; an attitude that would help us to make quick decisions, decisions that our lives depended on” (Nir 12). As things got