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Effects of the Holocaust on survivors
Lasting impact of the holocaust
Lasting impact of the holocaust
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Recommended: Effects of the Holocaust on survivors
Sadness, like most night fantasies of children, can be limited only to the imagination, and Nobel Prize winning Holocaust Survivor, Elie Weisel, is, simply put, bestowed with it. In his essay,“Perils of Indifference”, he reiterates the strong themes of pain and sadness to express the deep consequences of indifference. Weisel’s purpose is to prevent another mass destruction that occurs through world wide apathy, as in his own lifetime through the Holocaust. He adopts a somber tone to establish the great importance of his theme. Dissecting his work, one can see that through anaphora, hypophora, and antithesis he creates a world of words to pull the reader towards action and away from indifference.
Anaphora is a form of repetition that uses
An estimated 11 million people died in the Holocaust. 6 million were Jews. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel tells his story as a Holocaust survivor. Throughout his book he describes the tremendous obstacles he overcame, not only himself, but with his father as well. The starvation and cruel treatment did not help while he was there. Elie makes many choices that works to his advantage. Choice plays a greater factor in surviving Auschwitz.
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.
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
“Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.” (Wiesel 2006, p. 34) Elie Wiesel is a humanitarian but better known as a holocaust survivor and the author of the book Night. Elie recounts the horrors of his experience throughout the book and revisits times which he had not touched upon in years. His book initially only sold a few copies but later on through this renewed interest, Elie Wiesel’s book skyrocketed to fame and he started his journey in his humanitarian activities which in turn earned him a Nobel peace prize and resulted in his famous speech, Hope, Despair, and Memory. In Elie Wiesel’s speech, Hope Despair and Memory Elie Wiesel reminds us through his use of pathos and ethos as a speaker of the despair that humankind can create, but through our recollection and memories obtained from such despair we can summon the future with hope of change.
In the novel “Night” by Elie Wiesel, the author displays the transformation and the evolution of the average human being, through a horrible experience that he personally went through. When he is transported from one place to another, forced to leave everything behind, to go live in the ghettos, then in a horrible concentration camp. In the concentration camp Elie experiences numerous events that challenges his physical and mental limits. Some of these events made him question his faith, and whether there is such a thing as God, turning him from a conservative Jew to a reform Jew. Elie doesn’t love the concentration camps, yet he doesn’t hate it, in fact he does not care anymore. At a conference in 1986 Elie explains “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference”. (Elie Wiesel), meaning that opposite of love is not hate, it’s getting used to use to the situation, to the point that the person doesn’t care whether what is happening is right or wrong. In the novel Elie experience physical, mental, and spiritual pain, that test his humanity and morality.
Speeches are given for a purpose. Whether it is for persuasion, or education, or even entertainment, they all target certain parts of people’s minds. This speech, The Perils of Indifference, was given by Elie Wiesel with intention to persuade his audience that indifference is the downfall of humanity, and also to educate his audience about his conclusions about the Holocaust and the corresponding events. He was very successful in achieving those goals. Not only was the audience enlightened, but also President Bill Clinton, and the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, themselves were deeply touched by Wiesel’s words.
From being a bystander of bullying to committing murder are many ways of being indifferent. It is everywhere in everyday life in prospering countries and in poor and destroyed countries. Elie Wiesel knows how indifference feels and how it affects people. He was also indifferent and regrets what he did to this day. He was a victim of the Holocaust and lived through indifference. During his imprison ship he saw indifference everywhere in the camps. How he treated his father is what he regrets. He just cared about himself because another prisoner told him to. He believes his father died because he did not help him all he could. His whole book could be based on indifference if you interpreted it that way. From how the guards treated the prisoners to how kids including Elie treated their own parents. Indifference is a very big topic and a part of Night. Indifference is what pushed him to write his descriptive, emotional, strong, and outstanding novel.
Since the publication of, Night by Eliezer Wiesel, the holocaust has been deemed one of the darkest times in humanity, from the eradication of Jewish people to killing of innocents. Wiesel was one of the Jewish people to be in the holocaust and from his experience he gave us a memoir that manages to capture the dark side of human nature in the holocaust. He demonstrates the dark side of human nature through the cruelty the guards treat the Jews and how the Jews became cold hearted to each other. Wiesel uses foreshadowing and imagery, and metaphors to describe these events.
In the eyes of Elie Wiesel, author of Night, indifference whether it be in relationship abuse or another problem, is mentally damaging and needs to be eliminated. In his memoir, Night, Elie Wiesel illustrates how indifference can harm the mind of the victim when he says, “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live,” (Night 34). In this, Wiesel is speaking of his first night in Auschwitz. When he mentions silence he is referring to the indifference that the Jews in concentration camps faced from the rest of the world. Wiesel refers to that night as the time he lost his desire to live because he saw so much indifference toward the suffering of the inmates and the horrific things that were happening to them. After this, his desire to stay alive was destroyed because he watched as the world stood by, indifferent to the senseless murder of millions. Throught this, Wiesel illustrates that indifference will impact people for the rest of their lives. Because indifference
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lives changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before the German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4).
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 faith and 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?
Indifference is seductive, inhumane, and the line between good and evil. Indifference is helping the enemy, it is death. Writer and Holocaust Survivor, Wiesel Elie in his speech, “The Perils of Indifference”, argues that being indifferent to those who are suffering assists the enemy. He supports his claim by first defining and describing indifference as “seductive”, “tempting”, and “easier.” Wiesel goes on to illustrate the dangers of indifference by using personal experience and historical events as examples. Finally, the author creates awareness of indifference from the past, present, and future. Wiesel’s purpose is to describe why indifference is inhumane in order to persuade people not to be indifferent. He establishes a serious tone, critical, and somber tone for Politicians, Ambassadors, Mr. President, and members of congress.
“The Perils of Indifference” In April, 1945, Elie Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp after struggling with hunger, beatings, losing his entire family, and narrowly escaping death himself. He at first remained silent about his experiences, because it was too hard to relive them. However, eventually he spoke up, knowing it was his duty not to let the world forget the tragedies resulting from their silence. He wrote Night, a memoir of his and his family’s experience, and began using his freedom to spread the word about what had happened and hopefully prevent it from happening again.
The delineation of human life is perceiving existence through resolute contrasts. The difference between day and night is defined by an absolute line of division. For the Jewish culture in the twentieth century, the dissimilarity between life and death is bisected by a definitive line - the Holocaust. Accounts of life during the genocide of the Jewish culture emerged from within the considerable array of Holocaust survivors, among of which are Elie Wiesel’s Night and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Both accounts of the Holocaust diverge in the main concepts in each work; Wiesel and Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their survivals. Aside from the themes, various aspects, including perception, structure, organization, and flow of arguments in each work, also contrast from one another. Although both Night and The Sunflower are recollections of the persistence of life during the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal focus on different aspects of their existence during the atrocity in their corresponding works.
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.