Blog Assignment #3: Shot.

They took us to a cattle train

People ran

Shot.

We stood because there was no room to sit down

A boy tore the barbed wires from the train window

Young people jumped

Many jumped

Shot.

My father told us, run, maybe you will stay alive

You have the Belzer Rebbe's blessing

My brother Berele, my sister Hannah, and I

Jumped

The bullets did not hit me

When I did not hear anything anymore, I went back to find my brother and my sister

My brother Berele, my sister Hannah

Shot.

Blog Assignment #2: The Omnipresence of Death

One of the themes of the Holocaust that stuck in my mind was this sense that death could not be avoided, that death was everywhere. I live in a place today where the early arrival of death for even one person brings about grief throughout the community. When compared to the Holocaust, it almost seems silly that we do such a thing. Death was so prevalent during the Holocaust, one did not even have to be in a concentration camp to walk outside in the morning and see dead bodies scattered about the street. This omnipresence of death is a theme found in the book Night, as well as in the paintings of David Olère.

In this image, the ghost of a deceased Holocaust victim is hovering above a family that looks ready to perish at any moment. The faces of the family show the presence of starvation, disbelief, and anguish. The ghost floating above them almost seems like it surrounds them, his arm around the older woman a sign that he is not going to let them leave his presence. This depiction of death is very similar to a passage from the novel Night. “Death enveloped me, it suffocated me. It stuck to me like glue. I felt I could touch it. The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing (Wiesel 86). Wiesel has been marching in the brutal cold from one concentration camp to another for a seemingly countless number of hours. He cannot get the thought of death out of his mind, so much so that he wants to yield to it and perish forever. This is akin to the thoughts the members of the family in Olère's painting were most likely having, as the family looks defeated, halfway dead already, ready and awaiting death to annex the rest of what’s left of them.

These two images, images of the ubiquitous manner of death, have become everlasting images in my mind. It makes me almost feel lucky that I live in a society today where we can mourn the death of a single person, that we can feel as though death is a rarity, an unusual occurrence, a feeling that was stolen from the victims of the Holocaust.

Blog Assignment #1: How can something like the Holocaust happen?

One of the most frequent questions people ask about genocide is how can the people possibly allow these terrible things to happen. Sometimes, a small group in power will be responsible for the killings and tortures, with little public knowledge about them, but the Holocaust was different in that some of the killings happened in the middle of the streets, in the public eye, over a stretch of more than 10 years. This means that there was no chance that most of the public was unaware of the genocide. The main factors that lead the public into accepting, and sometimes participating in, the Holocaust are the use of Propaganda and other programs such as the Hitler Youth.

This propaganda poster above is one of many that you would see all throughout Germany during the Holocaust. The Nazi Party used propaganda as a way of convincing the public that they were superior, and others were inferior. They made their leader, Adolf Hitler, appear God-like so that people would give their complete loyalty to this one man, and not question what he did. They would also dehumanize the groups that they were targeting for the killing, such as this page from a Nazi propaganda childrens book

.

In this image, a Jewish pedophile is seen giving candies to little children, most likely in an effort to lure them away. The Nazis used this book, along with movies and posters, to make the Jewish seem as though they were cruel monsters, and anything but human. If people were made to believe that the Jews were not human, then why would they care if the Jews were being beaten and killed?

The Hitler Youth program was another mean for the Nazis to spread their messages and ideas to the people of Germany. Beginning in the early 1930’s, young boys and men would join and immediately be taught that Adolf Hitler is their savior and that Aryan people were superior. Who was going to argue with that? With this sense of superiority, many of these young boys and men joined the Nazis in their quest to destroy the non-Aryans. The German public was not unaware of what was going on, but was miseducated about their government and the people that government was targeting. The German people as a whole do not deserve blame for the Holocaust, but knowing their story will help future generations in identifying and preventing these horrors from happening again.