Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust
Elie Wiesel and the Holocaust
“How many Nobel peace prize winners lay here? The cure for cancer could lay here, dead. We will never knownever know.”
The Nazis refer to it as “The Final Solution of the Jewish Questions”; the world refers to is as “The Holocaust”. No matter what the name, The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews over the course of World War II. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Holocaust, is a world renowned author who in his book titled “Night” tells us his story of the horror and the murder of the holocaust. In an interview with Oprah, Elie Wiesel talks about many things can leave a crowd silent like: Auschwitz, the Jews, the German Soldiers, and his attitude towards the Holocaust.
Auschwitz was the largest and most horrific concentration camp used by the Germans throughout World War II. Covering a size equal to approximately six thousand football fields, this is the place where thousands of Jews were brought and murdered every day. Yet, Auschwitz was a secret to the world. Nobody knew that the Germans were performing such brutal tasks on ordinary people. Even too this day when Elie Wiesel and Oprah visit the camp, this place so bare, so plain, so vast, can hold so many memories.
Hitler and the Nazi party wanted to annihilate the Jewish population. The Germans deemed the Jews to be “inferior” to them and they were an outcast in the German Society. During the Holocaust the Jews were treated horribly. During Elie Wiesel’s interview with Oprah, images are shown of the Jewish slaves dragging stones, their bodies no more then a few inches wide; starved. They lived on pieces of stale bread and some sort of mixture referred to as soup. Each Jew was stripped of their hair which was used to make cloths, etc. They were given one set of clothes to be worn all year long and were not allowed to be washed. On their way to the concentration camps, the Jews were stuffed into trains, 100 people to a cart that should not be able to fit 20 and upon their arrival, they were shoved into barracks with 800 others where infection was the least of their worries.
It seemed as if the German soldiers had no conscience. That had been brainwashed to hate the Jews, that it didn’t even cross their mind to let them say a kind “good-bye” to their families. They inspected each and every Jew as they entered a camp, elders, woman, children, and people deemed unfit to work were killed