Danyelle Seneca Prof. Lawler English 81 October 10, 2011 Seneca 1 Personal Sacrifices of World War I In March to Freedom: A Memoir of the Holocaust by Edith Singer, readers learn a variety of valuable lessons, such as personal sacrifice. Jews soon feared for their lives when World War I broke out in 1933, and Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor. The Jewish community had to make countless of personal scarifies including: unwillingly pack their homes and belongings to relocate, they no longer acquired human identity, and were content with losing their lives to spare extra food. Hitler assigned Adolf Eichmann in charge of the Hungarian Jews; Eichmann was aware that the war would not last forever; knowing that, he wanted to discharge the Jews immediately. “After only one month of the German occupation, they told us to take whatever we could fit on a horse-drawn wagon and go to
The picture of innocence, walking among the worst evil in the world. It is after he saw this and the conditions that the Jews were living in that he began to take in more and more Jews that weren’t necessarily making him money, but because he was trying to save them. I believe that half the reason for Shindler’s change of heart is because of his accountant Itzhak Stern. He convinced Shindler that saving even those who weren’t “essential” to his business or to him making a profit was the right thing to do. At the end of the movie, all of his Jewish workers make Shindler a ring as a thank you for everything he has done for them.
They needed the Americans, and they used an ingenious tactic to cause the Americans to join the war: the death of its own civilians. The civilians on the ship, warned by the Germans, refused to listen to a warning, causing their death on the Lusitania. The total number of Americans who died represented a very small portion of the United States’ total population. The American public over-exaggerated the sinking of the Lusitania and overreacted to the death of very few people compared to America as a whole. The British blockade kept all trades away from the Germans, including food (Ghost Liners 124).Yet, when the Germans retaliate, the Americans hate them for it.
He was a strong believer in Judaism, and even studied mysticism and the texts of their sacred scriptures. However, once the Nazis came into his hometown of Sighet, all the Jews of his town were forced into cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz and Birkenau. There, his family was torn apart, leaving him with his father, and his sisters with his mother. Once they were split, he began to slowly lose his innocence. “Yet that was the moment I left my mother… In a fraction of a second I could see my mother, my sisters, move to the right… I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever…My hand tightened its grip on my father.
Although we know there was opposition against Hitler and the Nazi regime it is hard to assess who and how many people took a negative approach to him. Fear of the Gestapo (the secret police) was vast and always present as people were regularly being arrested for crimes of speaking out against Hitler and the Government and sent to the early concentration camps which were later became the ‘death camps’. After the war people were all too keen to announce their distrust and negative feelings towards Hitler as they were ashamed of what he had done, however during his regime many people did not openly oppose him. This makes it hard to know how many people really opposed Hitler. There were different types of opposition towards the Nazi
Through my personal research I thought that during the holocaust the Christians did very little to help out with the persecution of the Jews. “There were many Christians and Church leaders who endangered themselves in order to protect Jews. But many more supported and executed the Nazis' plans, and many did so in the name of Jesus and Christianity” (Judaism and Christianity: After the Holocaust). It seems that many people, especially Christians did a lot to help out with the Jews, but on the other side of the coin, some Christians helped out with the Nazis’ plans in the name of Christ. Even though the Nazis’ killed a lot of Christians during the holocaust as well, many of the Jews murderers we baptized followers of Christ (Judaism and Christianity: After the
Sunflower Wiesenthal’s belief of forgiveness is very right and frank: you cannot forgive someone who has not gone through the same tragedies and begs for your forgiveness, as if you are the representative of the whole who was suffered. I believe Wiesenthal should not have forgiven the dying Nazi soldier, although it was a dying man’s wise to be forgiven of mistreating the Jews. The soldier had no experience whatsoever in the tortures the Jews faced daily. The Jews embraced death every second of their painful lives and for some odd reason never decided to revolt against this tyrannical German government. This just shows that the Jews looked like the biggest danger or threat they faced while living in the concentration camps, was losing their
Today, we hear stories about the holocaust and we learn about it in global history, but we have didn’t live through it so we cannot relate to how the people felt as they were living through it. Reading the section of the book Night makes me wonder why the Jews didn’t rebel against the Hungarian and German officers but then I realize that rebelling would just get them killed. This portion of the book makes me think of my great grandfather because my grandpa would tell me stories about my great grandfather’s life in Ireland and how he had lived in terrible living conditions because he didn’t have a lot of money. Just hearing about my great grandfathers living conditions when he lived in Ireland makes me realize how terrible the Jews living in the holocaust had been because just hearing about my great grandfathers life makes me realize how much worse living in the holocaust would be because they were living in unsanitary places, did not have much food and were treated horribly and this affected all of the Jews in
As an adult he has realized it has made him who he is today. Growing up in the turbulent times that he did, his siblings taught him not to trust the Whites. He always had difficulty reconciling the fact that his Mother is white. As he wrote the book and learned of his Mother’s journey with race issues, he came to peace with being bi-racial. He did know that she was Jewish and that her entire family considered her dead because she married a black man.
“When I came to power, I did not want the concentration camps to become old age pensioners but instruments of terror.’ –Adolf Hitler. During the Holocaust unthinkable horrors happened to Jews. In the beginning, small things were done; the Jews had laws to follow. Such as wearing the Star of David, curfews, and where they are not allowed to be at. One place they were forbidden to be was schools.