Reflection on Night

For this blog, I will reflect on the book Night - obviously, it is still fresh in my mind. In class today, we discussed a lot of the different things that happen to the narrator and author, Elie Wiesel. His experience in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald was nothing short of terrifying. Reading his firsthand account of these places made them even more concrete to me than before. It is hard to fathom the sheer horror of what went on in these places, but reading about what someone actually saw with his own eyes - in my lifetime, no less - made it very real.

One thing that kept coming up in class, and seems to in all discussions of the Holocaust, is the question "How did this happen?" How did millions of people, an entire ethnicity scattered throughout Europe, get murdered? How, in 1944, did an entire town in Hungary such as Sighet, where Wiesel was from, not realize the seriousness of what was happening? Why did they stay in their homes when their rights slowly got encroached? Why did they keep making up excuses for what was happening, even up to the gates of Auschwitz?

Many people in class gave different responses for these questions, and they are all correct. Nobody, including the Jews, could believe that someone would have the will and sheer craziness of Hitler to wipe out an entire people. Not in the twentieth century, and not somewhere like Europe, where Jews made up some of the most prominent people in Germany and beyond. Besides the sheer disbelief that something of this magnitude could actually occur, there was the simple fact that these people were settled here; they were citizens just like their neighbors. Why would someone give up their home, livelihood, friends, etc. just because they had heard rumors of awful things happening around Europe? When you are settled somewhere, it is hard to make up a reason to leave. Persecution had happened before, war had happened before - it was easy to reason that it would all blow over, especially with the imminent defeat of Germany.

While there are many reasons why the Holocaust happened, the most important one to me is the simple fact that nobody could believe what was happening. Nobody in the outside world really knew what was going on until the first concentration camps were discovered; even then, it was still unbelievable. For the Jews in and around Germany, what was happening in the Holocaust was just that - unbelievable. For us, it is still unbelievable. Like someone said in class, it is human tendency to always think about it happening to them but not us. Reading Elie Wiesel's experiences, it was still hard for me to realize that this actually happened. For this simple reason, it is easy for me to see why people were reluctant to leave, even when the German Army took control of their towns. And this was only one of the things that made the Holocaust happen like it did. If it is hard to believe now, how could one believe it then?

The Rise of the Fascist States

Of all the aspects of interwar Europe we have covered thus far, the one I have found to be the most interesting is the creation and rise of fascism - specifically, how it came to be successful in the nations of Italy and Germany but not in other places, such as France and Britain. We went over the list of things "necessary" to have a successful fascist state and other things that weren't quite necessary but that definitely helped to contribute. Some of these things were more obvious than others, like the necessity of a national crisis (such as the Great Depression), or the incapacity of the established national government to deal with said crisis. However, the thing that I found most fascinating - and what I really didn't know, due to the "typical" images that are given of Mussolini and Hitler - was the amount of blame that can be put on the conservatives in Germany and Italy. Typically, we see thousands of people marching and saluting as these dictators give high-intensity speeches (and we imagine them to be spitting out anti-Semetic slurs as they are). This is the way we imagine them coming to power, and not much is done to combat this belief.
However, reading about the slow, scheming ways that these men came to power shed light onto a subject I thought I knew more about than I really did. Both Hitler and Mussolini vowed early in their careers to NOT use violence - for example, after Hitler tried to take Munich over in 1923. They were very aware of the fact that they were going to have to make calculated moves to exploit the government already in power and that the only way to really get control was to establish a majority. The fragmented political parties of Italy and Germany made it easier to gain this majority, but it does not detract from the inability of the conservatives to acknowledge the dangers lying within these power-crazed men. The lack of a real definition of "fascism" - even when attempted by Mussolini (he really gives more of a list of what it is not then what it is) - shows how desperate the people of these countries really were. It took a very bad situation for fascism to find a foothold, but it took more than this to really take power. For fascism to come to power in both countries, the traditional conservatives (who had come to view power as a given and not as a right ) had to truly fail to take control of their countries and adapt to the times at hand. Mussolini and Hitler did not simply seize power; it was handed over to them slowly.