All around the world, every moment of everyday someone encounters a moral dilemma whether it is minuscule or monumental. Going against ones religious or moral beliefs can be problematic; it may in fact be so moving that it causes one to reexamine their entire thought process. Regardless of ones age during the Holocaust, so many were faced with unbelievable ethical dilemmas. Many Jewish leaders faced moral dilemmas and made heroic decisions; many made life or death decisions to save themselves or others from the horrific plans of the Nazis, , denied Nazi orders in order to protect their loved ones, and several helped others survive.
Crisis situations and heavy consciences
Being placed in a crisis moment is difficult, it may in fact cause a person to challenge their own morals, allow a person to see how far they will go. Many people during the Holocaust had to choose between life or death in order to protect their loved ones. No matter the cost people made these decisions with heavy consciences. In September 1942, one particular Jewish med student gave deadly doses of morphine to many Jewish patients to spare them the inhumane death that the Nazis were going to deliver upon them (Nevins). This medical student took action against what the Nazi Party had in store for Jewish patients. He killed many people to protect them, regardless of the consequences that would later be in store. “…the major opened the door to find four Jews and his loyal Polish servant preparing food for the others.
Gut had no choice but to throw herself at the elderly major’s feet and beg for mercy. “They are my friends,” she pleaded with him. “I had to help them. I couldn’t let them die. (Fogelman).” Going against the Nazis was extremely risqué but many...
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soldiers during the Jewish Holocaust, knew that the Nazi’s actions were inhumane and cruel; hence, he commanded his soldiers to not confiscate property from the Jews. Although the Nazi soldiers did not take valuables away from the Jews, they still dehumanized and exterminated the Jews, rega...
Humans morals are challenged when forced to endure great suffering and torment. During the Holocaust, some inmates broke under great distress and their morals went wrong. Other inmates not only had to worry about the Germans, but also the people who lost all morality and turned into brutal savages. In the memoir Night by elie Wiesel, humans can’t maintain a moral mentality when under great suffering as portrayed through Elie and fellow inmates.
Elie Weisel once said this: “I know and I speak from experience, that even in the midst of darkness, it is possible to create light and share warmth with one another; that even on the edge of the abyss, it is possible to dream exalted dreams of compassion; that it is possible to be free and strengthen the ideals of freedom, even within prison walls; that even in exile, friendship becomes an anchor.” Compassion is not something that is easy to understand, or even easy to show sometimes. The Holocaust was a difficult time to comprehend: how could one man have so much power and hate towards a society of people that he started a genocide? There may never be the right emotional explanation to describe the disturbing events that happened during the Holocaust, but Elie Weisel was able to share his. His message was that compassion and friendship can refrain someone from sinking so deep into a dark sea like the Holocaust.
...d decisions that were need to be met, most will lie to one another or to themselves. It becomes a time where everyone is on their own. It just will not work trying to help others and still help yourself. It has been shown that when in the heat of the moment, most will reveal sides of themselves that either oneself or others may not have even known to be there. Now, after realizing not only the physical, but emotional ties that came along with the Holocaust, do you think that it was right to come to an “every man for himself” type of survival or should have they stuck together. This leads to the other question of would there have been a different outcome if had done so? Lies and deceit has shown not only a change in people at this time, but how in the end decisions that were made because of the shift of the inmates had really instigated the situation versus helped.
The atrocities of the Belgian Congo and the Holocaust are two of the main events in history that have been responsible for the mass murdering of millions of people. Although these events significantly changed the course of humanity, and the story behind each one is very different, there are significant factors that make them alike as well as different. Many would agree that comparing two atrocities that affected the lives of so many people and gave a 180-degree turn to each of their countries would be something very difficult to achieve. However, by comparing the behavior of both the perpetrators and the victims of both cases, we might be able to further understand the lack of morality and the inspiration that led to these awful events. The perpetrators in both atrocities tended to have a similar pattern of behavior when it came to the way they saw their victims.
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
“Whosoever saves a single life, saves an entire universe,” is the quote that is engraved on every heroic medal handed out by an organization called the Yad Vashem. But this is not just any ordinary medal; it is called The Medal of the Righteous. The Medal of the Righteous is a medal handed out by Yad Vashem in Israel to the courageous people who put their lives on the line to save a Jewish person or at least help them, during the Holocaust. There have been a total of 25,271 medals awarded. But why were these rescuers jeopardize their own safety? All of these Righteous helped the Jewish for a number of reasons: they became aware of the dangerous situation for the Jews, they loved and/or respected the Jews, or they were called by their profession
“99 subhuman Jews in the row, 99 subhuman Jews! Shoot one down, kick it around, 98 subhuman Jews in the row!” ~ Concentration camp worker during the holocaust. How could you begin to describe what’s always said to be such a horrible and tragic event? The Holocaust or Final Solution only seems as bad equal to the amount the person describing it values human life. To answer all of the topics presented to me I will be discussing the following; What is meant by “The Holocaust” or “Final Solution”, Why the Jewish were dehumanized, The choices made during the Holocaust, and My personal view on events that took place during the holocaust.
Self-preservation is defined as the protection of oneself from harm or death, especially regarded as a base instinct in human beings and animals. It drives us to do things we otherwise would not do, to accomplish things we didn’t know were possible. Self-preservation can often be found throughout history and literature, always in the most desperate of times. Nowhere is it more prominent than in the history and literature surrounding the Holocaust, during which over six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were brutally murdered in what has become known as one of history’s most deadly and widely publicized genocides. For almost 80 years, historians and Jewish survivors have authored and published
"Cracking The Code Of Genocide: The Moral Psychology Of Rescuers, Bystanders, And Nazis During The Holocaust." Political Psychology 29.5 (2008): 699-736. Business Source Premier. Web. The Web.
"The Myth of Rescue" by William Rubinstein has no doubt been one of the most attacked books by reviewers on this matter of the Holocaust. Rubinstein disagrees with the idea that some scholars supported, that the allies could have done much more to help the Jews, and explains why it was so difficult to assist them. Rubinstein's construction of the situation faced by the Jews of Nazi occupied Europe demonstrates some coherent and thoughtful points about the period of the slaughter of the Jews.
The core ethical teachings of Judaism are the Commandments of the Torah, the Prophetic Vision and the Book of Proverbs. These ethical teachings are all ultimately derived from the Jewish Bible or Tanakh. The importance of these teachings are to provide Jewish adherents with informed moral choices. One of the most important ethical issues that a Jewish adherent may face is pollution, decisions must be made in favor of methods that involve less rather than greater destruction to the earth because according to Bal Toshkit in the Prophetic Vision, the destruction of God’s creation is prohibited.
Many historical events took place in the 20th century that will be remembered forever, but the one occurrence that everyone knows of and will forever be remembered was World War Two. World War Two, the greatest tragedy that has ever happened on the face of the earth, the genocide of Jewish people, a complete nightmare. When people think of WW2, many of the time the image of “those poor Jewish people” comes to mind. Many ask themselves how this could have happened. It just doesn’t make sense to them. Did people around the world at the time of WW2 have these kinds of deliberations? If they did have this kind of reflection then how did six million people perish? During the time leading up to the outbreak of World War II, the Western Press consistently carried numerous reports of the German's anti-Jewish policies and their purposeful victimization of the Jews living in Nazi Germany as well as the annexed territories. The general public cannot claim that they did not know what was going on, that they were uninformed. Whether or not they chose to believe it however, is a completely different story. The public were indeed outraged in many of the cases but the governments of the major European democracies felt that it was not for them to intervene for they felt that the Jewish problem classified as an internal affair within a sovereign state. The attempt to discover what exactly the people around the world did to save the Jewish race is not going to be an easy task but it is going to be a worthwhile one which should uncover a lot of unknown facts to many people.
In the Holocaust millions of Jews lost their lives because of simply who they were. Many however hid and survived this dark event in history. It was the year 1933 and WW11 roared on, some saw it as a war against countries but eventually everything dark and ugly came to the light. Adolf Hitler was the chancellor of Germany and had obtained great popularity with the German people. While beginning to attack nations he was also trying to destroy all Jews in a horrific mass genocide. Creating concentration camps and taking all that the Jews owned he began to round up these human beings as if they were cattle. The stories account for them as being kidnapped at midnight to being tricked into going to their death thinking they were going for a better life. Not all stories ended in despair, there were many who managed to outsmart the Nazis and their allies. Many hid from them, blended in or fled to safe countries. Even under all the pain and horror many prevailed and won the prize of life. People, no matter who will fight to live no matter what the circumstance. These are the stories of those fortunate survivors who hid, fled, lived to tell their perilous account of the holocaust.
The holocaust attested that morality is adaptable in severe conditions. Traditional morality stopped to be contained by the barbed wires of the concentration camps. Inside the camps, prisoners were not dealt like humans and thus adapted animal-like behavior needed to survive. The “ordinary moral world” (86) Primo Levi refers in his autobiographical novel Se questo è un uomo (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 on 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.