Understanding The Meaning of Freedom: James Yates, Tadeusz Borowski, and Adolf Hitler

Understanding Freedom

Freedom: the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint. While a Webster dictionary provides a sound definition to this most coveted of words, it is by no means universal. While one person may define freedom as their accessibility to a clean source of fresh drinking water, another may define freedom as a having a stable wi-fi connection. In the context of the world during the second world war, there were at least three men, James Yates, Tadeusz Borowski, and Adolf Hitler, who each had their own understanding of the word, “freedom-” Yates, that of solidarity, Borowski, that of freedom’s nonexistence, and Hitler, that of racial superiority.

James Yates, the author of a memoir titled, “Mississippi to Madrid,” detailed his life as a southern black sharecropper turned Spanish Civil War freedom fighter. Fleeing Mississippi because of mass lynchings, Yates migrated to Chicago and then again to New York, where he later joined a brigade of three thousand soldiers, including one hundred African Americans, to fight against fascism in Spain. Yates described Jim Crow law in Mississippi as, “a lightning that would surely strike home sooner or later"(Yates, 17). It was clear that to Yates, the freedom he sought to understand was nowhere near his hometown. He dreamed of a better life up north as he said, "I had only one obsession, to get up North to magic places like Chicago and New York, where I'd heard there was some freedom, and where white folks didn't shoot you "(Yates, 23). Even in the city, Yates still endured the brunt of the Great Depression, saying that, "the crash was a great puzzle to me. It was something white people allowed to get out of hand temporarily; since Black ...

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...gs of the meaning of freedom. While Yates’ quest for liberty lead him on a journey of solidarity, Borowski’s gruesome experiences in German concentration camps caused him to doubt the very existence of freedom itself. While Borowski believed that no freedom gained by the anguish of others is legitimate, Hitler sought to bring his chosen people freedom from ‘lessor’ humans by eradicating them. In a congruent WWII setting, three entirely different understandings of freedom arose, which begs the questions: is our understanding of freedom relative, and is there such thing as true freedom?

Sources

Borowski, Tadeusz. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. New York: Penguin, 1976. Print.

Hitler, Adolf, and Michael Ford. Mein Kampf. [Camarillo, California]: Elite Minds, 2009. Print.

Yates, James. Mississippi to Madrid. New York City USNA: Shamal, 1986. Print.