Literary Insperation of the Holocaust Why do the survivors of such a tragic event such as the Holocaust want to remember those horrifying times by writing about memories that most people would only want to forget? I will show, Weisel has talked about, and as others have written, that the victims of the holocaust wrote about their experiences not only to preserve the history of the event, but so that those who were not involved and those who did survive can understand what really happened. They wanted the people of the world to realize how viciously they were treated. On top of wanting us to understand, they also want to understand why this happened. Why did the Lord let this happen? Why did the people of the world stand by and let such a thing happen to so many people? Today in the 90's we cannot think of letting so many people suffer, as those seven million people did in the mid-40s. Perhaps the most recognized writer of the holocaust is Elie Wiesel. He was taken from his home and put into the concentration camps when he was still a young boy. Wiesel once said, "I write in order to understand as much as to be understood." He was liberated in 1945 and, once he was liberated "he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over six million other Jews." In a lecture on the dimensions of the holocaust Wiesel said, ""The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration" is a contradiction in terms. As in everything else, Auschwitz negates all systems, destroys all doctrines. They cannot but impoverish the experience which lies beyond our reach." "How can one write about a situation which goes beyond its very description? How can one write a novel about the Holocaus... ... middle of paper ... ...took for her to survive the death camps. Wiesel, Elie. Dimensions of the Holocaust. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, This is a book on a series of lectures given at Northwestern University by Mr. Wiesel and several other experts and survivors of the Holocaust. Wiesel, Elie. One Generation After. New York: Avon Books, 1970. This is a novel by probable the most famous writer on the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel. Here he askes the question why? As he tries to understand a world God has abandoned. Wiesel, Elie. "Stay Together Always." Newsweek 16 Jan. 1995. InfoTrac Database. Information Access. 15 Sept. 1999. Wiesel tells of his last days at Auschwitz and his struggle to stay with his father. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Bantum Books, 1960.This book gives a horrifying account of the holocaust. This book won Wiesel the Nobel Peace Prize.
Elie Wiesel writes about his personal experience of the Holocaust in his memoir, Night. He is a Jewish man who is sent to a concentration camp, controlled by an infamous dictator, Hitler. Elie is stripped away everything that belongs to him. All that he has worked for in his life is taken away from him instantly. He is even separated from his mother and sister. On the other side of this he is fortunate to survive and tell his story. He describes the immense cruel treatment that he receives from the Nazis. Even after all of the brutal treatment and atrocities he experiences he does not hate the world and everything in it, along with not becoming a brute.
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.
In 1944, the Jews of Hungary were relatively unaffected by the catastrophe that was destroying the Jewish communities of Europe in spite of the infamous Nuremberg Laws of 1935-designed to dehumanize German Jews and subject them to violence and prejudice. The Holocaust itself did not reach Hungary until 1944. In Wiesel's native Sighet, the disaster was even worse: of the 15,000 Jews in prewar Sighet, only about fifty families survived the Holocaust. In May of 1944, when Wiesel was fifteen, his family and many inhabitants of the Sighet shtetl were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. The largest and deadliest of the camps, Auschwitz was the site of more than 1,300,000 Jewish deaths. Wiesel's father, mother, and little sister all died in the Holocaust. Wiesel himself survived and immigrated to France. His story is a horror story that comes to life when students in high school read this novel. Even though many students have not witnessed or participated in such horror, they relate to the character because Wiesel is their age. They cannot believe someone went through the nightmare he did at their age.
He says, “These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations,... so much violence; so much indifference.” (4). Indifference is shown by not only the people involved in these violent events, but also Wiesel’s audience as well, many clueless of these events. For one to fail to know and understand these events in order to stop and bring awareness to them is just as wrong as committing the event in the first place, according to Wiesel. One must also believe the event itself to escape the corruptive qualities of indifference. During the Holocaust, many did not believe what was happening and chose to then ignore it rather than do anything about it. The unaware audience and people in the 1940s thoroughly proves the corrosiveness of
The resistance of the Holocaust has claimed worldwide fame at a certain point in history, but the evidence that the evil-doers themselves left crush everything that verifies the fantasy of the Holocaust. For an example, in Poland, the total Jewish population of over thirty-three hundred thousand suddenly plummeted to three hundred thousand. Ten percent of the population survived the Holocaust in Poland. Almost every country that the Nazis have conquered has the same percent of survival as Poland. In Elie Wiesel Wiesel’s memoir Night, the activities in the concentration camps, the suffering of Jews, and the disbelief of the inhumane actions of the Nazis result in making people resist the truth.
...igher being, or achieving a lifetime goal. People can survive even in the most horrible of situations as long as they have hope and the will to keep fighting, but when that beacon begins to fade. They will welcome what ever ends their plight. The Holocaust is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Elie Wiesel wrote this memoir in hopes that future generations don't forget the mistakes of the past, so that they may not repeat them in the future, even so there is still genocide happening today in places like Kosovo, Somalia, and Darfur, thousands of people losing their will to live because of the horrors they witness, if Elie Wiesel has taught us anything, it is that the human will is the weakest yet strongest of forces.
Eile Wiesel was born in Transalvanya. He was asked many times to write about his experinces in the Holocaust. He waited ten years after he was freed from Buchenwald, he didn't want to write a hate-filled account of his experince. He recived the Noble Prize for Night in 1992. He lives in the United states and teaches at Boston University.
The Holocaust is a period of history known widely as the extermination of the Jewish race and other minorities that occurred in Germany during World War II. For years, there has been a debate among historians on whether the Holocaust was an idea created by Hitler or if it was one that emerged from the Nazi party ranks. These two differing ideas became known as intentionalism and functionalism and have both gained support among historians. Intentionalism holds Hitler accountable for the actions taken against Jews and believes that the Holocaust originated from him rather than the Nazi party. The functionalists believe that the Nazi party was a party in disarray, with members competing with each other for dominance within the party but with the
Many Holocaust survivors had to suffer through concentration camps and endure the pain of never seeing their loved ones ever again. There are survivors that never went through any concentration camps. Some of the survivors were known as hidden children because they were taken into homes were Nazis could not find them. Others were put into labor camps were strictly put to work, and if you couldn’t work anymore, you were killed. There were also death trains that some jumped out of and escaped from because if you stayed on the train,you were not going to survive. Some people joined armies of various countries that Hitler planned to invade and when they surrendered to Hitler’s army they were taken to prisoner of war camps. Survivors have put their story on TV and the internet so they can share with everybody what not only them but most Jewish people during the Holocaust went through.
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
One cold, snowy night in the Ghetto I was woke by a screeching cry. I got up and looked out the window and saw Nazis taking a Jewish family out from their home and onto a transport. I felt an overwhelming amount of fear for my family that we will most likely be taken next. I could not go back to bed because of a horrid feeling that I could not sleep with.
My name is Eva Berlinski. I’m only 13 years old and I was brought up
This poem is complex because it can be interpreted in many ways. More specifically, it can be interpreted two, one of the ways to look at this is to review it from the viewpoint of a German officer or a survival that was in the camp and escaped. The poem points out that the officer is a serious and hard working person who was promoted to a position to do the roll call in the camp. While making the call he noticed that someone is missing, “suddenly he thinks he’s made a mistake: all eyes, he counts again in the open notebook. “ It is
The Holocaust was a terrible time in history; many innocent people were killed, all because of their faith. The book Night by Ellie Wiesel portrays the vigorous journey Wiesel and his family undergo throughout this torturous time. The holocaust wasn’t just genocide against the Jews; it was also a long process of dehumanizing them too. Their valuables were taken and their heads were shaved stripping them of their identity.
The Holocaust began on January 30,1933 during the time Adolf Hitler was dictator of Germany. World War II was going on when the Holocaust began. The Holocaust is the genocide of the Jewish race.