Overall this topic has changed the way I thought of the Holocaust. Mainly because I hadn't learned much about the it to start with and this new knowledge was horrible and disgusted me. Even though I can’t  relate to the struggles of one who survived the holocaust it is difficult having to go over this topic in a classroom. I second guessed the reality of it all, of how humans could have the capability of doing such harmful things. I have a new regard for survivors and their courage, and to those who perished.  After hearing the words of people, survivors, talking about their experience and how it left them with awful memories it made me imagine how hard it would be to move on everyday without remembering dreadful things that they had to go through. After reading the book Night, by Elie Wiesel I realized how terrifying experiences basically destroy everything you love or once loved. There is an obvious difference in the behavior at the beginning and towards the end of the bo...

Throughout our study of the Holocaust, most of my time was spent processing how one man, more or less, managed to cause this horrendous event in human history. Hitler’s movement was the reason the word “genocide” was created. I know that when we think of events like these, we don’t necessarily associate them with our present. But just like us now, no one thought this form of evil, this desire to annihilate a whole race, could be carried out successfully. But it did. And for a long while too. The idea of furnaces, ha… furnaces, built to burn humans bodies, dead or alive, it didn’t matter. “‘Over there, that's where they will take you. Over there will be your grave. You still don't understand? You sons of bitches. Don't you understand anything? You will be burned! Burned to a cinder! Turned into ashes!’"(56 Wiesel). Can you imagine hearing that you will be burned alive or shot for reasons unknown to even Adonai Himself? Not knowing why you are in this hellhole in the fir...

Before reading Night, I had a little prior knowledge about World War 2 and the Holocaust in general. I had read the book Maus once, and read some other books about topics like the Hitler youth and Jewish defiance. However, reading Night and going to the Holocaust museum in Washington widened my view of these topics extremely. At first, I was a little uneasy going in to the unit as I was unsure about the severity of the topics we would be covering. Going through, I learned many more things than I had previously known, such as the amount of death camps there actually were and how some camps were work camps that enforced slave labor. This affected me because I got to learn about how awful some of the German acts were, and how awe inspiring the acts of defiance by the Jewish people were. Some people in camps, before being taken away to be killed, would shout words of solidarity and empowerment to the other prisoners, using their final breaths to give strength to their fellow Jewish peo...

Inhumanity, a word we know as non-human. Throughout the book night, this word appears often. Inhumanity is what the holocaust was. We look through the eyes of Elie Wiesel who experienced the holocaust face to face. He wants us to remember the dead, but yet he wants us to even more honor the living. He talks about this in the book night and in his speech at the Nobel peace prize acceptance. The Germans used gas fire and forced to kill the jews. What kind of world would kill their own species because of the german’s own doing? I have seen mentally unstable, ost of the germans were doing this because of anger and hate. How could our own species kill each other just through anger? Why does violence have to be the answer in this crude world of the holocaust? In the movie Life is Beautiful the Germans use the word showers for their gas chambers so that the children don’t know what is ahead of them. The children think they have to take a shower, but really they will die. We look at the cr...

In my experiences of reading Night, the one word I would use to describe the novel was tragic. Night for me was incredibly hard to read. It’s extremely sad and something I can’t imagine happening now. Just the fact that someone would ever want to completely erase one kind, is just shocking. If I ever witnessed seeing that in my life, personally I don’t think I could handle it. If I had to bear witness and tell someone about what happened, it would be very hard to even say words, because all of the memories would probably pop back into my head, and I would start to get emotional. For instance, in Night, one part of the novel that really impacted me was the part where the guards used babies as shooting targets. However, when Elie Wiesel was standing against Nazi Germany in his Nobel speech, I felt extremely inspired. Another sad part was in Life is Beautiful. It was when the father and Joshua got on the train to the concentration camp, and they didn’t know what and where they were going,...

The theme that most impacted me from the novel Night was faith. I learned that faith can be crushed by hellish situations, but people always find a way to not give in. People lived in faith till the end of their lives. Faith is the belief that God exists. People in the novel, Night , denied the existence of God. One said,“Blessed be though, Almighty Master of the universe who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night.” Others said that this was a test and that God was testing who remained faithful in a place designed to purge the Jewish race from the world. Who remained faithful would be highly regarded by God and all to be judged of pure heart. It is like how God tested Job. Job became a hero because he stayed faithful to god. Faith matters because without it no one would have a moral compass to guide themselves. The world would be anarchy. Humanity would crumble. The world would be ruled by dictators, but then this may be a bit too extreme. At least without Faith in ba...

The theme I identified was inhumanity throughout the Holocaust. I learned about so many horrible and tragic events that happened in the Holocaust. Like death marches which were just unbearable to hear and how cruel they were to the Jews. How they had the mindset to kill and not to care. How this time period seemed so far from reality hearing it now. To be killing Jews for without a purpose and just to kill them all off was very shocking. This topic matters so much because we have to prevent events similar to the Holocaust from ever happening again. Apart from violence the words spoken to Jews and not even identifying that they were human. We have to remember this because so many people died for believing in their own religion. To be transported to different concentration camps from family and probably never seeing them again. The conditions in these camps were terrible with many Jews dying everyday because they were incapable of doing work or just being killed was harsh. The standard...

My experience with the studying of the Holocaust was deep. It impacted my feelings, dreams, thoughts, and emotions. Over the month I learned about the torture and suffering of the Holocaust. I also learned the struggles, the thoughts and the overall story of the ones in it. Now, this topic altogether has huge significance. It’s mainly taught for making sure it never happens again, and to inform all kids on what happened at this time in history. I’m one of those kids that got that privilege to learn and I have learned a lot. We went from auto-biographies and interviews to going to the museum and videos. This taught me to take things and treasure them because of me having them. It also made me watch out more and watch how I say and/or portray my thoughts or feelings. Night the novel we read by Elie Weisel was very touching and “painful” to read. It had me on the verge of tears and kept me wondering why. We wrote multiple blog posts on the novel (one of which you are reading now) and ...

I am both connected and impacted by the theme of faith that is shown throughout the course of the book. Coming from a Catholic household, I have always been taught how to do what God would do, and love and praise him. I would get scared to not finish the sign of the cross after praying, get paranoid if I didn’t pray at night, and would feel bad if I didn’t go to church at least once a week. Even with all of that stress of completing all these tasks that I was told I was supposed to do, I never thought that anyone would have good reason to turn against their god. That was, until I read night. After reading “Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast would mean a surer, swifter death. We fasted here the whole year round. The whole year was Yom Kippur. But others said that we should fast simply because it was dangerous to do so. We should show God that even here, in this enclosed hell, we were capable of singing His praises.” (Wiesel p. 38) I realized just how easily people w...

One theme in Night that really impacted me in Night was the theme of losing faith and feeling hopeless. Throughout my reading of the book, I kept debating with myself if I would have kept faith in God or if I would have lost faith and felt betrayed or disregarded like some of the people in Night , I still don’t know. Before reading Night  I hadn’t even given much thought to whether or not victims felt hopeless. Although after finishing Night I realize how important this was. Beliving God was there or believing you are all alone could alter your choices. It changed your mindset. If you kept faith, you might believe that if you waited and if you prayed that God would save you. You might think that the Holocaust was a test to see if you would keep believing in God. Some people in Night did think this and tried to keep everyone else faithful. Although if you believed God had left you, you might think more on the terms of everyone for themselves as Elie did in Night . Everyone feels...

Identity was a theme that had a great impact on me. At the beginning of Night Elie’s identity is that of an innocent child, a student of Talmud, and a devout Jew. But the concentration camp experience strips him (and his fellow Jewish prisoners) of his identity. Elie’s hair was shaved, he was dressed like all of the other prisoners, and while facing the atrocities of the camp, he loses his innocence and his faith in God. Elie and all of the other prisoners are given numbers instead of names. They are no longer individuals, but prisoners, or “creatures”, and eventually simply just bodies. In Night   I learned the importance of being young and strong to be able to survive in a camp . In today’s world identity is important because it’s what differentiates every single one of us. Having a strong sense of identity seems to be desirable because it can help make decisions and teach us how to behave. For example, my parents are from The Gambia but I do not identify as an African. Althoug...

My experience in studying the Holocaust was filled with different emotions of sadness, anger, and sorrow.  I felt sadness for the stories about the splitting up of families, children thrown in fires, and women breaking off their toes.  I felt anger towards the Nazis for manipulating children into their own beliefs and killing people just because they were different.  If we kill people because they are different, in my opinion, everyone would die because all of us are different in our own way. That’s what makes us special and that's what got us to where we are today, which is the opposite of what the Nazis believed.  I also felt sorrow for the victims, the family members, and generations of Jewish people. The most important part of what I learned was to honor and never forget. We have to honor what the victims and survivors went through and what they saw. After all the pictures and videos and even after visiting the Museum, I can't wrap my head around what happene...

Before our unit of the Holocaust, I didnt fully understand how brutal this time period was. In the book Night , Elie talked about his experience at the concentration camp, which was extremely hard to read. Going to the Holocaust musuem was even harder. When we watched life is beautiful, they talked about how they take older people and children into a room and tell them that they are going to take them in for a shower. But they actually put them into a gas chamber. And at the holocoaust museum I saw a picture and there was someone who knew what was going on with the gas chambers and was throwing out her kids, screaming let me die and not them. But an overall question I had during this unit was that, did the people torturing the Jews actually believe that they think it's fair to take innocent people to a concentration camp, or were they just afraid of Hitler and had a better advantage because they were German. In the beginning of the book Night , Elie talked about how much he cared a...

Hopelessness In Night Andrew B. In Night Elie Wiesel experiences some of the worst acts in recent history. He, unlike many survives these events and goes on to help others never forget the holocaust. In Night Elie often recounts the hopelessness of his life, and of the lives of all the inmates in Bercau. It’s clear how he could come to that mentell state. He has very little control over his life and of the basic freedoms that he had always experienced. By the end, though he had much more faith in the future and was keeping a more positive mindset, this is what probably allowed him to keep going and survive the whole ordeal. In the concentration camps the strength at which you came in did not matter, the thing that would divide the strong and the weak was what they had to live for and their ability to maintain hope against all odds and see that there is hope and a way through all of this struggle and a way to live after. Elie does not do as well as some, he loses faith in his god,...

Throughout the novel Night , Elie's faith in God changes dramatically. Seeing as to how he starts to question why God would put anyone through such brutality infuriates him. Elie naturally believes that everything they are going through is extremely unfair. However, as the novel progresses and he slowly become less faithful, this showed me that the whole idea of faith and had lost its meaning completely. That most people had started to lose hope in humanity and what lay ahead for them. In Elie’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, he quotes a little boy who once asked him: “Can this be true, this is the 20th century after all. This is not the middle ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed, and how can the world remain silent?”. It is hard to comprehend still to this day on the atrocity that occurred. There are certain questions like the ones stated above, that still don’t have answers. It is unexplainable and certainly inexcusable on these events, and how these people were treate...

1. Everyone says never to dwell on the past. They say that we must look ahead and create a bold and bright future, however, to ensure that we don’t repeat past mistakes we must learn about our history to continue forward. As much as we would like to forget that the Holocaust ever happened and spare ourselves from attempting to comprehend the scale and inhumanness of these atrocities, we must not. For then we run the risk of repeating history, possibly at a larger scale.  Where do we begin? With the man behind it all our the conditions that led him to power. We could go into excruciating detail while explaining it, or, instead, we could focus on those whom we have lost, those who lost their lives as a result of the madness. We chose the latter. In Night Elie Weisel attempts to share with the world what he experienced in hopes that we as the human race could attempt to bear witness to what happened to him and many other victims. As we know it would be much easier to simply lea...

My experience studying the holocaust has made me realize the truma that people had to go through just because of their relious beliefs. Throughout this unit I have learned the ways that Hitler rose to power using propaganda, the fear of others, and more. The Holocaust matters not just because of the vitcims involed and lives lost, but also because history can repeat its self and if we all learn about how this happened we can prevent ourselfs from getting in the same situation. The Holocaust can connect with my life and others lives because it reminds us how life could be worse and also how lucky we are. It is very important to honor the trauma of the victims and survivors because we must remeber how brave and strong they had to be to get through the holocaust and still remain positive. We also must remember the courage of some of the family members that were not jewish but went just so they could be with their family. In Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech he said that th...

After studying the atrocities made by Nazism, I learned how tragic the whole event is and how hard it is for anyone to witness. From the starting hope of victims to eventually, desperation. From trusting God will help them to suspect him and finally abandoned him. The biggest reflection of that was that Weisel himself stopped believing in God, he wanted to learn more about that before. This did and didn’t surprise me.  This whole event was terrific, it’s a reminder for nowaday people like us to prevent such thing from happening again. I can still remember the scene described by Wiesel that he almost git smothered by people who tried to get some rest in a corner, and the scene of father and son got killed. It’s inhumane to treat people like that. And I can still remember the sentences he wrote about when he grows up, he saw an elegant lady tossing coins to poor native children and let them fight to the death for it, and found it amusing, but she explained it as charity. I fou...

Throughout reading night I found myself affected by many themes, But by far the most impactful is hopelessness. Not even halfway through the book Elie has lost everything. The only reason he lives is for his father, and when his father dies he is relieved. I think he's relieved because he can finally die. At the end of the book he says that he has no reason to live and he wont describe the rest of his time in the camp. I am genuinely confused as to why he kept living. He had come to a place in his existence where life was pointless and to add to it he is suffering in a concentration camp. I think any reasonable person would end the pain in his scenario, however Elie being unreasonable obviously isn't true, as he had written a book and won a Nobel Peace Prize for it. I'm still confused as of writing this, and it might be because I've never experienced what Elie has felt. I don't think I or anyone in our class can identify with the hopelessness displayed in night, w...

The Death of God by Mikayla Never shall I forget the flames that consumed my faith forever Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames All that was left was a shape that resembled me The death of God in the soul of a child who suddenly faces absolute evil God is dead The God of love, of gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the watchful gaze of this child, vanished forever into the smoke of the human holocaust My eyes had opened and I was alone Terribly alone in a world without God, without man Without love or mercy I was nothing but ashes now

Night and Flames Stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration consuming us When conflagration extinguished Nothing left in the sky  But extinct stars and unseeing eyes Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire! In front of us, those flames In the air, the smell of burning flesh The small faces of the children  Whose bodies transformed into smoke under a silent sky. My soul had been invaded  And devoured by a black flame No. All this could not be real.  A nightmare, perhaps… Dusk had fallen, Daylight disappeared into a gray mist The night was growing longer  Never-ending

link for my poem

Last Aspiration Night had fallen Fear was greater than hunger Cannon shots broke the silence of the night Every bomb that hit filled us with joy Gave us renewed confidence We were stronger than cold and hunger. Stronger than the guns and the desire to die. But we were exhausted We had lost all strength All illusion Empty and dead Not a living soul I saw myself in every stiffened corpse But deep inside I knew that to sleep meant to die One falls asleep forever.

Death and Sorrow By Paolo There. I was face-to-face with the Angel of Death . . . The first night in camp,   turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. A small red flame A shot Death enveloped me, it suffocated me Something inside me,  Rebelled against Death Die, Here or elsewhere,  What did it matter Die today, tomorrow, or later  Too late to save your old father . . .  No prayers said over his tomb No candle lit in memory He called out and I did not answer I did not weep and it pained But I was out of tears Free at last! . . .