Night
Without a doubt, one of the darkest episodes in the history of mankind involved the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and gays by Nazi Germany. In order to get a good sense of the horror and despair that was felt by the interned, one simply needs to read the memoirs of Elie Wiesel in his "Night", as translated from French by Stella Rodway and copyrighted by Bantam Books in 1960. Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. His parents ran a shop and cared for him and his three siblings, Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. Early on, the Jewish community of Sighet payed little heed to the stories of what had happened to foreign Jews that were expelled. By the time Germans had entered Sighet, it was too late for the people to escape their fates. At first, they were made to give up all of their valuable possessions and move into makeshift ghettos. Next came deportation of the entire community to the Auschwitz internment camp. The way that the people were piled into cattle wagons was only a precurser of appalling events that were to come. The horror really dawned on Elie when he realized that the large smokestacks that he saw were from crematoriums that were set up to burn the bodies of the thousands upon thousands of
To conclude, Elie Wiesel's "Night" is a haunting and accurate account of the cruelty that man can inflict on man. The lessons learned from this account cannot be forgotten. If they are, then they are sure to be repeated. Jews that were killed in the gas chamber. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of ha! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Having experienced the great hopelessness of the victims and the extreme cruelty that man is capable of, I have gained a much greater appreciation of the plight of human rights. What really surprises me about the situation was the mild response from Countries such as Italy and Romania to the reports of these outrages There was almost no organized opposition to what was happening, even on the part of most of the churches. Only the Danish protected the Jews in their country, sending them to neutral Sweden. The other day, Pope John Paul II apologized for the past sins of the church, but did not address the way that Pope Pious VII threw a deaf ear towards the Holocaust. What is more disturbing than the fact that their was not opposition to the Nazis by other European countries is the fact that something as horrible as this could happen again. In Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990's, the "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims and Croats by Serbs led to the removal of 2.5 millio! n people from cities and villages, mass murders, and the internment of men and boys in as many as 100 concentration camps. Although the situation d
Some common words found in the essay are:
Tzipora Jewish, Rosh Hashanah, German-occupied Europe, Croats Serbs, European Jews, Italy Romania, Wiesel's Night, , Nazi Germany, Pious VII, elie wiesel, death camps, internment camp,
Approximate Word count = 1061
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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