The Power of the Past: A Look at the Impact of the Holocaust on Identity in Thomas Buergenthal’s A Lucky Child. Although many people might like to believe that their past does not determine who they are today, this is not entirely true. Human beings are greatly influenced by past experiences, whether this be in a positive or negative manner. The things people undergo during their youth, good and bad, consistently shape their perspectives, values, and interactions with the rest of society. Thomas Buergenthal suffered horrific trauma at a young age, which exerted influence on him for the rest of his life. His time in the Holocaust had a tremendous impact on who he was during the war and the person he grew up to become. His toxic surroundings …show more content…
Thomas became extremely resilient and persevered when faced with hardship. This was not at all unusual, as children often must “pay for [the trauma of war they experience] throughout their lives” (Zessin-Jurek). According to Shira Birnbaum, author of Trauma and Resilience in Holocaust Memoir, resilience is a quality that many child survivors of the Holocaust develop. Surviving in concentration camps that were designed to weed out Jewish youth called for the heightened “resilience of child Holocaust survivors” that they developed out of pure necessity (Zessin-Jurek). That resilience, along with a bit of luck and a few helpful strangers, was Thomas’ main saviour during the war. It certainly also proved helpful to him with his many achievements throughout the rest of his life. After his liberation from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Thomas lived in a Jewish orphanage in Poland. For over a year, there was no indication that either of his parents had survived the war, so Thomas had to explore other options for his …show more content…
It should therefore not be a surprise to anyone that the terrible crimes and cruelties experienced by human beings in many parts of the world since the Holocaust do not weaken my commitment to human rights. Instead, they reinforce my belief in the need to work ever harder to promote human rights education at all levels and to strengthen international and national legal and political institutions capable of making it ever more difficult for governments to violate human rights. 222. The 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary'
By using his remarkable story about surviving the Holocaust in his book A Lucky Child, Thomas Buergenthal expresses the purpose by writing in a removed tone, illustrating how dramatic the Holocaust was, while empathizing and examining all the different sides of a human and the different points of view that alter the word luck .
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.
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.
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.
How much more do we need to do before we start responding to these legacies? Works Cited United Human Rights Council. United Human Rights Council. N.p., n.d. Web. The Web.
Authors sometimes refer to their past experiences to help cope with the exposure to these traumatic events. In his novel Night, Elie Wiesel recalls the devastating and horrendous events of the Holocaust, one of the world’s highest points for man’s inhumanity towards man, brutality, and cruel treatment, specifically towards the Jewish Religion. His account takes place from 1944-1945 in Germany while beginning at the height of the Holocaust and ending with the last years of World War II. The reader will discover through this novel that cruelty is exemplified all throughout Wiesel's, along with the other nine million Jews’, experiences in the inhumane concentration camps that are sometimes referred to as “death factories.”
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during World War II, Winston Churchill, once said, “Those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.” Throughout Elie Wiesel’s autobiography, Night, his faith in humanity, his belief in God’s justice and his childhood and innocence destroyed and changed his identity as a result of his experiences during the Holocaust. Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew in the book Maus written by Art Spiegelman, struggles through life during this European catastrophe, but does not portray a memory as affecting as Elie Wiesel’s. Night and the book Maus both contextually focus on survivors of the Holocaust, but Night illustrates a more graphic and realistic memory of this gruesome event. The portrayal of memory has similar, yet, contrasting effects when Elie Wiesel and his book Night, play a more vital role in remembering the broad perspective of the Holocaust compared to Vladek Spiegelman and the book Maus.
Every day, people are denied basic necessary human rights. One well known event that striped millions of these rights was the Holocaust, recounted in Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. As a result of the atrocities that occur all around the world, organizations have published declarations such as the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights. It is vital that the entitlement to all rights and freedoms without distinction of any kind, freedom of thought and religion, and the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being of themselves be guaranteed to everyone, as these three rights are crucial to the survival of all people and their identity.
In today’s society, children are viewed as precious cherubs with glowing auras of innocence and youthfulness enveloping them. We idolize them as beacons of hope and love. Seeing them in pain is something that we as human beings should not ignore. Therefore, the poem “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” came as a shock to me. The lack of humanity towards children during the Holocaust is painstakingly eye-opening to the deterioration of human life. Knowing this, Abraham Sutzkever delineates a fine line between the value of human life and how easy it was to overlook it in the midst of the Holocaust. Yala Korwin’s “The Little Boy with His Hands Up” depicts the grotesque horrors of the Holocaust with themes of violent manipulation and psychological
“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.
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
Imagine waking up on a normal day, in your normal house, in your normal room. Imagine if you knew that that day, you would be taken away from your normal life, and forced to a life of death, sickness, and violence. Imagine seeing your parents taken away from you. Imagine watching your family walk into their certain death. Imagine being a survivor. Just think of the nightmares that linger in your mind. You are stuck with emotional pain gnawing at your sanity. These scenerios are just some of the horrific things that went on between 1933-1945, the time of the Holocaust. This tragic and terrifying event has been written about many times. However, this is about one particularly fascinating story called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.
In the Bible, many kings were selected by God to rule over a kingdom and those rulers chosen were always favored and protected by the Almighty due to their obedience and faith. The story of David, Joseph, Saül, and many other rulers can perfectly expose those facts. In the movie Mongol, the life of Genghis Kahn and the tumultuous path he had to employ in order to mutate into the great emperor he became. Throughout the movie, a Divine force or aid could be noticed always liberating Temudjin from any traps and pitfalls encountered on his path to greatness so, was Temudjin a chosen from the Divine?
Childhood is a powerful and important time for all humans. As a child, the things one sees and hears influences the choices and decisions they make in the future. “How a child develops during early and middle childhood years affects future cognitive, social, emotional, language, and physical development, which in turn influences their trust and confidence for later success in life” (Early and Middle Childhood). Yehuda Nir’s, The Lost Childhood is a first person memoir based on the life of a youthful Jewish child who survived the Holocaust. Taking place from pre-World War II 1939, to post-World War II 1945, this memoir highlights the despicable things done during one of the darkest times in modern history. Prior to being published in October
On December 10th in 1948, the general assembly adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration, although not legally binding, created “a common standard of achievement of all people and all nations…to promote respect for those rights and freedoms” (Goodhart, 379). However, many cultures assert that the human rights policies outlined in the declaration undermine cultural beliefs and practices. This assertion makes the search for universal human rights very difficult to achieve. I would like to focus on articles 3, 14 and 25 to address how these articles could be modified to incorporate cultural differences, without completely undermining the search for human rights practices.