Comparing Lopate's Resisting The Holocaust And Night

When does a nightmare become a reality? When waking up was no longer an option to escape the demons surrounding you. With each swing of the inevitable pendulum, death no longer became an option and the angels providing hope transformed into demented human executioners. This living nightmare of humanity describes the Holocaust. Even decades later, literature still bears witness to the disregard of ethics and morals during this time period. Lopate’s “Resisting the Holocaust” and Wiesel’s memoir Night equally exposes this reality of humanity’s worst sin, however the effectiveness of both pieces lies in the perspective of the author on one of history’s demented chapters.

War is the bane of humanity. Instead of progress and hope, it brings destruction

For Lopate in “Resisting the Holocaust,” he accentuates his perspective on death and the Holocaust through statistics and his belief in relativity. Within his literary onslaught of words, Resisting the Holocaust, Lopate believed that the “advantage of the living dead over the rest of us seemed unfair” (Lopate, 89). To justify such a claim, Lopate proceeded to do the unthinkable and stand up to the bully of society’s views of the Holocaust. In Lopate’s perspective, the Holocaust seemed to be nothing more than a series of numbers not living up to its hype compared to other genocides. To him, the Holocaust had the sense of being “the double property of amazingly plastic” (Lopate, 92), yet Lopate justifies his perspective with other genocides relative

His perspective, relative to Lopate’s perspective, is more notable in context. Wiesel truly exposed the uniqueness of the Holocaust in describing how such an event was able to destroy a person’s belief of god. Wiesel’s description of this event is memorable in all its meanings: “Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never” (Wiesel, 22). The tone of Wiesel’s memoir emanates a sense of hopelessness and it reeks of pitiful death with every page of his memoir. Each chapter was an emotional time-bomb prolonging such a living nightmare. Elie’s perspective of the Holocaust was inclusive and provided the audience with memories rather than pages of facts, like Lopate’s work. Such an inclusive perspective contributed to the overall mood of the audience on the Holocaust and attributed to a sense of witnessing the action through words. Such that one might feel emotionally moved after reading Elie’s memoir compared to reading Lopate’s pitiful defense