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Survival in auschwitz critical analysis
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Comprehending the life of these prisoners of Auschwitz, and how the Germans view the Jewish people and their culture is puzzling. Baumgarten was born and raised a “Jew-hating” German, and had from a young age been fed with stereotypes, and insults about the Jewish people. Baumgarten had no idea that he carried Jewish blood in him, and even had kids who attended Hitler’s youth academy. Discovering he was Jewish, and sharing the shack with other Jews in Auschwitz bestowed him with a perspective of how they live. Noticing how these prisoners faulted God with the holocaust, and everything they had endured so far captivated him, which bothered Baumgartner. The reason being, that the insult about Jews being dirty, hating, and unfaithful, had been …show more content…
recognized by him witnessing it in this cell. Dirtiness had obviously been exploited from humility by the German engineers on purpose, to degrade the Jews, and break them.
However, Baumgartner witnessed the betrayal of each other, due to whether they think God is guilty or not--proving hatred, and their faithfulness suffering a grazing hit, because of these accusations against God. Opting to step out of silence, how Baumgartner lectured them created a re-evaluation of how these people should spend their last days. Explaining to them, Nazis purposely input dirtiness there, snatch their belongings, alter their physical appearances, and humiliate them all to make them less of a man. Engaging in the brink of Baumgarten’s point strengthened my own perception of life as well, he stated that Nazis can strip drastically everything from those prisoners...except their faith. Clearly being the most moving speech in the documentary, processing this enlightening flow of words made me realize the importance of faith in life. Faith is a crucial component of making one a man, and that’s a privilege that can never be forcefully stolen from you. This value makes half a man, what completes the other half, is family values. Mordechai went against his father Kuhn’s wishes was
devastating. Kuhn had raised his son to be faithful and never doubt God’s plan, yet Mordechai is actively compiling arguments for God’s guiltiness, which is heartbreaking. Kuhn watched his son go against the morals of faith he had branded into his son from a young age. The purpose of this inclusion, is because of the ending of the documentary. The doctor came in to retrieve his selection of prisoners set to be gassed today, and unfortunately Mordechai’s number had been called. Upon realization, Kuhn as any father would’ve done, begged and vouched to the Blockaltester to swap his son for him. Begging and persuading, Kuhn quickly talked this switch into place, and took his son’s place to die, pleading to the Blockaltester; “My son’s not ready, he’s not ready.” In spite of how Mordechai angered his father, Kuhn sacrificed himself, so that his son would live to see another day. Which goes to show the solidity of family values in the making of a man.
On their way to the concentration camp, a German officer said, “’There are eighty of you in the car… If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot like “dogs” ”’ (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans compared the Jews to dogs or animals, and that the German have no respect towards the Jews. Arrived at the concentration camp, the Jews were separated from their friends and family. The first thing of the wagon, a SS officer said, “’Men to the left! Women to the right!”’ (Wiesel 29). After the separation, Eliezer saw the crematories. There he saw “’a truck [that] drew close and unloaded its hold: small children, babies … thrown into the flames.” (Wiesel 32). This dehumanize the Jews, because they were able to smell and see other Jews burn in the flames. Later on the Jew were forced to leave their cloth behind and have been promise that they will received other cloth after a shower. However, they were force to work for the new cloth; they were forced to run naked, at midnight, in the cold. Being force to work for the cloth, by running in the cold of midnight is dehumanizing. At the camp, the Jews were not treated like human. They were force to do thing that was unhuman and that dehumanized
It is because of this inhumanity that he loses faith, not only in God, but also in men. He tells how, at the beginning, the Germans were "distant but friendly." However, when they reach the camps, the soldiers are transformed from men to monsters.
Elie Weisel and his family, taken from their home along with hundreds of other Jews from their hometown, were brought to Nazi Germany’s Concentration Camps. “From this moment, you come under the command of the German army.any of you who is later found to have kept anything will be shot on the spot,” (Weisel 15). Even prior to entering Birkenau, Auschwitz, or Burma, the prisoners were forced to give up all belongings under the threat of death. In a godless and unloving environment, twelve-year-old Elie must now survive against all odds in a concentration camp. “You’re going to be burned”.
Eliezer’s horrible experiences at Auschwitz left him caught up in his sorrows and anger toward God. His loss of faith in God arises at Auschwitz. He doubts arise when he first sees the furnace pits in which the Nazis are burning babies. This horrifying experience ...
Millions upon millions of people were killed in the holocaust, that is just one of many genocides. There are many similarities between different genocides. Throughout history, many aggressors have started and attempted genocides and violence on the basis of someone being the "other".
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.
The violent actions of the Germans during this event force an image upon them that conveys the message that the Germans had little respect for the life of a person, specifically that of a follower of Judaism, and their capability to act viciously. If the Germans are acting so cruel and begin to act this way as an instinct towards the Jews, they are losing the ability to sympathize with other people. This would be losing the one thing that distinguishes a human from any other species, and this quote is an example of the dehumanization of the victim, as well as the perpetrator. Later on in Night, all the Jewish prisoners discover their fate at the camps and what will happen to people at the crematorium. They respond by saying to the people around them that they “...can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse” (Wiesel 31). This simile develops the theme by comparing the Jewish prisoners to cattle in a slaughterhouse and emphasizes what little value their lives had to the Germans, implying they are not worthy of human qualities. The Germans are once again not able to emphasize with the Jews that are around them and being murdered, which over the course of the novel leads to them being
One of the many themes that has arose is the theme of injustice. The theme of injustice stood out just by reading the back of the book. As stated before, this book takes place in the time of Hitler’s reign in Nazi Germany. If anyone had previous knowledge as to what Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” entitled, social injustice would evidently be pointed out. These prejudices could be something such as concentration camps, torture, discrimination of the Jewish race and the destruction of homes and shops. Although many Germans had no idea what was happening in Germany during Hitler’s reign, one would be quick to judge Germans as a whole. This is the perspective that is dominant in the novel, they never mention massacre or concentration camps, and they just lived their normal lives. After the author educates the reader about a Jewish man named Max Vandenburg, the narrator says: “You could argue that Liesel Meminger had it easy. She did have it easy compared to Max Vandenburg. Certainly, her brother practically died in her arms. Her mother abandoned her. But anything was better than being a Jew” (Zusak 161). This quote by itself shows how terribly the Jewish people were treated. In their daily lives, they are faced with destruction, social injustice, and discrimination. They are treated very disrespectfully; they live with racial slurs, house raids, as well as having the Star of David painted on
Holocaust Hero: A One of a Kind Man. What is a hero? A hero can be classified as a number of things. A hero can be a person who, in the opinions of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal.
Eliezer Wiesel loses his faith in god, family and humanity through the experiences he has from the Nazi concentration camp.
At first, the Jews believe the Germans to be harmless. It takes dark times and drastic measures for the German’s true wickedness to be unveiled. One of the first instances in which the Jews are exposed to the true evil of their antagonists is the first moment they get off of their cattle cars at Birkenau-Auschwitz. Consumed by Madame Schachter’s prophesied “fire,” the sky symbolizes the flaming hell that the Jews are about to endure. At this moment, as the Jews stare silently at the ravenous chimneys spouting out flames, their worst nightmares evolve into reality. At midnight, the witching hour, the Jews’ eyes finally begin to see the evil that surrounds them.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.