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?
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You focus on the central question that we have been grappling with for the past two weeks: how did this happen? And though we've listed reason after reason, each factoring into the the culmination of what was the Holocaust, I don't think any explanation no matter how sophisticated leaves one with a sense of satisfaction. The fact is the Holocaust happened, and the world could never be the same. You also talk about how wide-spread disbelief among the Jews aided the Nazis. I think I would have been incredulous too. But as unspeakable as the Holocaust was, there have been other cases of genocide that have occurred since. Even the U.S. forcibly interned Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. In other words, is the Holocaust such an aberration? And if not, what does that say about human beings? What does that say about us?
ReplyDeleteA great post and an excellent response. In many ways, no matter how much you know about the Holocaust, there still seems to be a way in which it is unfathomable. Some part of you still wants to try to reject what you know to be true, to try to reject the horror of it. And yet, as Wes points out, in other ways it made genocide rationally acceptable. Our minds found way to accept that one group of people would attempt to exterminate another group.
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