Posted on 12/21/2012 12:53:41 PM PST by ConservativeDude
Elie Wiesel was 15 when the Nazis came for the 15,000 Jews of his hometown of Sighet, Transylvania, in May 1944. Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, his mother and sister were murdered within hours, while he was put to work as a slave labourer. Eight months later, the Germans evacuated the camp and forced the survivors on a death march that ended at Buchenwald. Wiesel was one of the few still alive when the Americans arrived in April 1945.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Indeed frightening.
Once again, the sins of collectivism on display.
Just precisely so. It is all incremental. The aggressor knows that we will always try to cope, to see the bright side, as it were, to continue with life. Then all of a sudden it’s too late.
I just can’t figure out why Elie Wiesel would be such a gun control nut after experiencing what happens when a government is out of control.
It is amazing.
Some lessons are impossible to learn, I guess.
I agree, it is puzzling.
The main point to his book (that I got out of it) was that people have the capacity, if put in various situations, to degenerate completely.
I recall that one of the most powerful and depressing parts of that book was him wishing for his father, who was becoming a burden and attracting unwanted attention, to die, so he could live.
That is what can happen to us in a bad spot.
All through it in my sheltered Southern youth I could somewhat comprehend (not accept) in my segregated ignorance the local racist hate against the blacks because of their obvious physical differences from whites, (if lobsters looked like kittens they would not be boiled to death was the hypothesis) but Jews?
The South has overcome the ancient hates rooted in race but the world may never overcome the even more ancient hates rooted in the religious bigotry eternally directed at Jews.
...with Obama the showdown is coming and we will soon see if the Founders knew what the Hell they were doing.
I think there are reasons beyond our control, as it were, which are at work in anti-Semitism.
“Night” is a very good book and I recommend it.
On the other hand, Wiesel is referred to in Hollywood as “there’s no business like Shoah business,” which is as funny as it is cynical.
Wiesel’s organization (I forget its name) was taken to the cleaners by that bastard Madoff.
Unless my memory proves me wrong, what I remember from “Night” is that babies were being thrown on a bonfire when Wiesel arrived at the concentration camp. I don’t remember which one it was - probably Auschwitz.
Thanks for the link to Hilberg. Fascinating man, for sure. I was unaware of his work.
The worst part for me was reading his description of seeing his mother & little blonde six year old sister walking away hand in hand, presumably straight to the gas chambers. My (blonde)granddaughter was the same age when I read that.
...the word had already come down from Himmler to not slow the pace of mass murder but to accelerate the pace of covering up the mass murders since they were losing the war at the time and knew war criminal nooses awaited them.
Ah, I remembered it pretty accurately. There was a time when I thought that this could never happen in the USA - and maybe it can’t - but I’m not so sure now...
Another thing I remember about “Night” was that a madman showed up in Wiesel’s village several years prior to the Holocaust exclaiming that a fire would consume them all. No one, of course, listened to him.
Thanks for the info.
Himmler was Hitler's second in command because he was excellent at rationalizing mass murder—made shooting naked unarmed Jews in the back of the neck the same as heroic combat on the battlefield.
“I’m not sure we all have it in us but I think most of us do.”
Yes, I’m afraid you may be right.
I read an excerpt from a memoir of a Jewish man who actually survived the whole war in Germany (in The New Yorker magazine if anyone wants to try and find it). He was already very old and somehow prominent, I think he might have been a big professor of music or something like that. So, his life became truly hellish, but he never went to a concentration camp and he did live past the end of the war.
He said when Nazism was just getting started the really awful people weren’t the soldiers, they were mostly just young fellows and almost seemed embarrassed about everything. It was the people he was already acquainted with who were power mad and gleeful - like the librarian at his local library who was more than pleased to tell him Jews couldn’t use the library anymore.
Those little tin pot dictators are everywhere, all the time. Look at Michael Bloomberg for just one example, and he’s even Jewish, he should really know better.
I’m sorry I can’t remember the man’s name or anything. My recollection is that this diary was published long after his death and caused quite a stir.
To me the worst part was when they said Jewish people couldn’t have their pets any more. What would you do if that happened to you? What would you do if you were really old and it happened?
But you know what, stuff like this happens regularly - Rawanda, Cambodia, Nazi Europe, there doesn’t even have to be an ethnic or religious difference.
It’s original sin, that is what I believe.
PS - I love your tag line, it reminds me of the Junot Diaz book where he talks about the “sugar cane curtain” of the Dominican Republic
That book is one, very powerful statement.
“All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing,” — Edmund Burke
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