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Ingrid and I were good friends growing up. Three times a week we did gymnastics, and we spent much of the time in between together as well. Before practice, which started at 4, we would always go to Ingrid’s grandparents, who made us lunch and gave us rides. This was a practical arrangement, as all of our parents were working past practice hours. Going to her grandparents became something we would look forward to. As kids we come and go, without registering much of what the things around you might say about somebody. In retrospect, I am glad to have made the acquaintance of my friends grandparents. The story I am about to tell was highly formative. Ingrid’s grandparents were Jewish, and so was Tiril herself. When you are a kid, those differences …show more content…
Persecution leaves you with two options, and those are either to surrender or to escape. When I was just a little girl, I had to leave my friends and my town in Austria because of the ongoing persecution. Survival was critical, and we had to act fast. Your great grandparents, Ingrid, took me and my brother away in time. We went to Paris, but we did so without my grandparents. My grandmother was virtually incapable because of her bad hips, and they couldn’t find the strength to move quickly and hunt for a new home. It was too overwhelming for them, and there was nothing we could say, nor offer to make them come with us. Luckily, perhaps, I didn’t understand what this meant for their fate until later. Yet, I still remember our goodbyes. My grandma made me promise to keep my head high, and never let anyone tell me how to live my life. As with their fates, I didn't understand this until much later in life.” Ingrid’s grandma paused at this point, and stood up. She left the room, but came back with an orange, tiny …show more content…
In the 30s in Germany, an Austrian man called Hitler came to power. He was a dictator, and he ordered persecution of the Jewish people. He believed there was a superior race, the Aryan, and the rest were not to have power in this world. At the bottom of his list were the Jews, and he demanded that all Jews were to wear an orange star, the Star of David, to mark their inferiority. The dictator’s followers, the Nazis, followed his orders, and this is ultimately the reason we had to escape. The Holocaust, this period of unjust treatment and gruesome manslaughter, cost the lives of over 6 million Jews in total. Luckily, we managed to get to France in time, but it wasn’t safe there for long. Paris was soon after invaded, and therefore we couldn’t stay there either. So we left for Portugal, temporarily, as we didn’t intend for it to be our new home, primarily because it felt too close to the war zone. We made the decision to cross the pond to Brazil, but we did so without your great grandma. One sunny morning in June, my mom went to the market in the town of Lisbon, but she never returned. The time after, dealing with my little brother and a heartbroken dad, I started losing faith. When we got to Brazil, I found myself committing crimes, such as stealing and threatening innocent people. I was burnt out, and I believed in no such thing as humanity any longer.” At this point, Ingrid’s grandmother had lost herself in the horrifying memories and looked
On Hitler’s Mountain is a memoir of a child named Irmgard Hunt and her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany. She herself has had many experiences of living during that dark time, she actually met Hitler, had a grandfather who hated Hitler's rule, and had no thoughts or feelings about the Nazi rule until the end of WWII. Her memoir is a reminder of what can happen when an ordinary society chooses a cult of personality over rational thought. What has happened to the German people since then, what are they doing about it today and how do they feel about their past? Several decades later, with most Nazis now dead or in hiding, and despite how much Germany has done to prevent another Nazi rule, everyone is still ashamed of their ancestors’ pasts.
Six million Jews died during World War II by the Nazi army under Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews. In Night, Elie Wiesel, the author, recalls his horrifying journey through Auschwitz in the concentration camp. This memoir is based off of Elie’s first-hand experience in the camp as a fifteen year old boy from Sighet survives and lives to tell his story. The theme of this memoir is man's inhumanity to man. The cruel events that occurred to Elie and others during the Holocaust turned families and others against each other as they struggled to survive Hitler's and the Nazi Army’s inhumane treatment.
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.
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
In Nina and Gustav’s story, they were in constant fear of the world around them. For Nina, being both Jewish and a girl meant that she would never be safe i...
During World War II, millions of innocent people died in one of the most horrific genocides ever recorded. Jews, along with other religious groups were heavily persecuted by the Germans, forcing them to leave their homes and families to go to designated places where the heartless killing and torture of these groups took place. In Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Art obtains the countless stories and memories of his father Vladek as he recalls his sad and sorrowful experience of the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, the Germans conceptualized the Jews and other prosecuted groups as lesser than regular human beings. Because of this mentality, they treated the victims of the Holocaust with hatred and abhorrence. The Germans treatment of the Jews led
“Nazis!” Yossi said, as he was being tackled by a Nazi soldier. The Nazi soldier tackles Yossi and put a hand over his mouth. He was jumped by the soldier and was stolen of his money, clothes, and dignity. Yossi shed a tear as the soldier puts Yossi’s hand behind his back. Nothing but fear went through his mind, thinking about his life, and everything he has ever accomplished
No one understands such a dreadful experience as the Holocaust without shifting in the way you were before. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author defines his suffering at the hands of Nazis. Taken with his family in 1944, they were directed to Auschwitz to come before the dishonorable selection. There, Elie parted from his mom and sister leaving him with his father who was too busy to spend any time with his son before the camp. Being under the Nazis' control, Elie and his father moved to several camps. The Nazi command “deprived Elie...of the desire to live..., which murdered his God and soul and turned my dreams to dust” (32).
Jews have perished because of their beliefs since the beginning of time but never have so many Jews been persecuted worldwide as they were in World War II. Anne Frank’s diary reaches a place within all of our hearts because it reminds us how easily the innocents can suffer. Sometimes we may choose to close our eyes or look the other way when unjustifiable things happen in our society and Anne’s tale reminds us that ignorance, in part, claimed her life. Sadly, her story is but one of many of those who died in the Holocaust and as with other Jews, her fate was determined by the country she lived in, her sex and her age.
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness,” Desmond Tutu once said (“Desmond Tutu Quotes”). During the Holocaust, the Jews were treated very badly but some managed to stay hopeful through this horrible time. The book Parallel Journeys by Eleanor Ayer shows how Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck who had two very different stories but managed to stay hopeful. Helen was a Jew who went into hiding for awhile before being taken away from her family and being sent to a concentration camp. Alfons was a member of the Hitler Youth where he became the youngest member of the German air force. To him, Hitler was everything and he would die any day for him and his country. As for Helen, Hitler was the man ruining her life. The Holocaust was horrible to live through but some managed to survive because of the hope they contained.
“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.
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
Segregation from the rest of society begins the dehumanization of Sighet Jews. The first measure taken by the Hungarian Police against Jews is to label them with yellow stars. Early in Night, while life is still normal despite German occupation of their town, Wiesel explains: “Three days later, a new decree: every Jew had to wear the yellow star” (11). This decree is demoralizing to Jews because it labels them and sets them apart from the rest of Sighet’s population. Like trees marked for logging or dogs marked with owner tags, many people in Sighet are marked with yellow stars, to reveal their Jewish faith. Avni describes Wiesel and the Jews as being “propelled out of himself, out of humanity, out of the world as he knew it” (Avni 140). The Jews are taken out of the normal lives they have led for years and are beginning to follow new rules...
I was privileged to know some of my maternal great-grandparents, my gentile great-grandparents, although one of them died shortly before my birth. I never had the chance to know any of my paternal great-grandparents, my Jewish great-grandparents. They were taken from me. I am not alone in my grief. Every Jew has lost family and friends in the Holocaust, which we call the Shoah, the calamity. Despite this deep-rooted ancestral pain, the Holocaust is not an exclusively Jewish trauma, although Jews were its most numerous victims. Yet Amis chooses to write almost exclusively about Jewish suffering in the Holocaust, which is something that a gentile cannot remotely understand or relate to. The passage recounting the story of the bomb baby was especially horrifying to read from the perspective of an irreverent goy. Reading about Jews being “picked up” (Amis 141) from a mass grave, being brought to life with carbon monoxide, and eventually crammed together in their hiding place, behind a removable panel in a cloth factory, while the secondary consciousness of a Nazi doctor looks on with concern, was frankly disturbing. Time’s Arrow is not a new and enthralling retelling of the Holocaust. It is the desecration of the murder of my
One day a girl named Clara Grossman witnessed her life broken into shambles. She possessed the freedom she wished for, but it was seized out of her hands by Adolf Hitler. She witnessed her own journey first through a ghetto and then the most notorious death camp, Auschwitz. Horrifying scenes and exhausting work left her as a mess. If you were thrown into Clara’s shoes, how would you respond? In 1940, ten years after the Nazis gained authority of Hungary; Hungary established anti-Jewish laws. But four years later, Germany decided to invade Hungary to deplete the last remaining Jewish population in Europe, the Hungarian Jews. At the same time, Auschwitz was becoming an infamous camp where death was a common occurrence. 1.1 million Jews in total were efficiently killed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Soon, you will learn the preparations made by Germans to commit genocide and a Hungarian Jew’s experience of the Holocaust.