In the two films and Elie Wiesel’s Night the overlying theme of the individual experience is portrayed. Often, when I inform myself more about the happenings of the Holocaust, I discover just that: information. I read about the details of the Holocaust in textbooks and see documentaries about the Holocaust from a historical perspective. However, Wiesel’s Night as well as the film Conspiracy deters from that general, sociological perspective. In Night, Wiesel narrates from the first-person point of view, and this narration makes my journey as a reader with him all too real.
The Holocaust remains our most vivid example of hell on earth because individual lives and individual memories were forever changed.From Night, I was able to dive into the thoughts of the individual person experiencing and witnessing such hatred and evil among men. I was able to empathize with Wiesel when he recounted seeing babies and children meeting their death at the camps. I was able to empathize with the Jewish people who clung on to hope and waited for an absolution that, at the time, did not seem to ever be coming. In Conspiracy, I witnessed the pressures of the political system and how simple rhetoric could not have been the only factor into the German soldiers supporting this mass extermination of Jews. On the German side, psychological issues and outside influence from those in political power played a major role in the decisions that the Germans made and the hell the Jews went through. These factors are not in any way an excuse for these German soldiers to have implemented the cruelty they had, but they do help us in realizing their mindset at the time.
Genocide killings are much more than a case study of the extermination of a group of people. We do not sympathize and empathize with what we read about the Holocaust because a group of people suffered and died; we sympathize and empathize with this mass extermination because each person suffered and died. Each person’s way of living was destroyed. Each person’s outlook on life was forever altered. Each person developed a reason to doubt and be angry with their God. And all of this as a result of the crime against humanity: destruction of a sect of humanity on the unjustified basis of being themselves.
I completely agree that the journey that Elie Wiesel takes his readers on in Night is a depressing and vivid realization that he in fact went through the torture and lived through the mass killings of his people. Through his book, we can "walk in his shoes", so to speak, down the charred path littered with the bodies of his Chosen People. That individual experience is "all too real" for the reader. We read and live through his struggles, through the loss of his mother, the death of his father, and we understand when he speaks of the flames he hears the lament of the other captive Jews.
ReplyDeleteI also empathize with the idea of the loss of the individual and speak of it in my own blog. It is true that we do not mourn the mass loss of life as a whole in the Holocaust. We mourn the loss of each life, every 1 out of the 10 million lost. The loss for the world was each of those persons who were senselessly slaughtered.
I completely agree with your perspective on interpreting texts about genocide and specifically the Holocaust. This is somewhat along the lines of what I discussed in my post: the importance of using literature and film as a medium for carrying on the messages from history. It's difficult to convey the importance of certain events to the masses solely through facts, numbers, and timelines. However, something that every single person can relate to is the human story. Reading about another person's perspective and experience with a historical event is possibly one of the most powerful forms of conveying cautionary tales.
ReplyDeletetwo good comments on the post, and the post references the importance of seeing genocide from a different perspective than supposedly objective history (history is never objective)
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