Survival In Auschwitz As Survival Testimonies Of The Holocaust

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Looking back at history, it can be seen that there were different ways that individuals, groups, and nations responded to the events of the Holocaust. In 1938, there was a conference held in Evian France to talk about how to respond to the Jewish refugee crisis that was taking place. Out of the 32 nations, the Dominican Republic was the only country to officially agree to accept these Jewish refugees. The main contributing reason as to why the majority of the nations said no was due to the world-wide economic depression. Another shocking aspect of this conference was that the representatives from the other countries spoke in general terms such as using terms like “numbers” and “quotas” instead of talking about the Jewish refugees as people (Facing History and Ourselves, 2019). Bolivia, Switzerland, Shanghai, and Palestine allowed Jewish refugees, but the number of refugees was still too large to accommodate space for. The United States was no help in this situation either. In 1939, it was found that 83% of Americans were opposed to the Jewish refugees coming into America. They believed that the refugees could potentially place more of a burden on the nation’s economy and also being afraid and not trusting people who were different. Some Americans feared that if they allowed a lot of immigrants to come in that communist infiltrators and Nazi spies would sneak in with them. There was also antisemitism in America. An infamous example of an individual who showed anti-Semitism was Fr. Charles Coughlin who was known as the radio priest. He would preach antisemitism over the airwaves accusing Jews of manipulating financial institutions and conspiring to control the world. Henry Ford is another example of Americans spreading anti-Semitism (Facing History and Ourselves, 2019).

Although there were some people in America that were anti-Semitic there were some individuals who were trying to help the Jewish population that was affected by the Holocaust. Martha and Waitstill Sharps agreed to travel to Europe to help victims of the Nazis by working through an aid group named the Unitarian Service Committee (Facing History and Ourselves, 2019).Senator Robert Wagner and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers both sponsored a bill that would allow German Jewish children to enter the United States outside of the official immigration quotas. Unfortunately, this bill never reached a vote in Congress. (Facing History and Ourselves, 2019). Denmark is an example of how a nation helped their Jewish population. They were able to rescue 90% of their Jewish population. They were able to do this by fisherman smuggling Jews from Denmark into Sweden. The individual fisherman and boat owners who participated in the smuggling of Jewish refugees put themselves at great risk due to the consequences that would occur if they were caught. In order to evade detection, they would give children sedatives and sleeping pills to keep them quiet as they made the venture to Sweden. Throughout this process, these fishermen were able to ferry 7,200 Jews into Sweden. 500 Danish Jews were deported to Theresienstadt ghetto and 51 Danish Jews died as the result of the Holocaust (Blakemore, 2019).

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A burning question that a lot of historians and Holocaust researchers ask about the Holocaust is if the Allies knew about Auschwitz, why did they not do something to stop it. An explanation to this is that the intelligence about Auschwitz from a military standpoint was sketchy and imprecise. Another aspect was that when Auschwitz was discovered by the Allies in 1944, the majority of the victims of Auschwitz were dead and the Soviets were moving closer to the camp. Another contributing factor was that there was no knowledge of the German rail timetables so there was no way to stop the trains or even identify them due to the fact that Europe’s railroad network was so large (Forbes, 2015).

Throughout his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel’s view on God and his theology changed throughout his experience of the Holocaust. Before the Holocaust happened, Wiesel was extremely spiritual. By day, he studied Talmud and then at night would go to his synagogue to weep over the destruction of the temple. Once he was in Auschwitz though, his view on God and his theology began to change. He admits that he stopped praying for a while. His response was “I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice!” (Wiesel,1972). He began to become angry with God and wondered why God would put his people through something so devastating such as the Holocaust, which explains why he said he felt the relation with Job from the Bible. Another shot to his view on God and his theology was when he had to witness the hanging of a child and a voice behind him shouted out, “For God’s sake, where is God?” (Wiesel, 1972). Wiesel said that a voice inside him said “Where He is? This is where-hanging here from this gallows.” (Wiesel, 1972). Throughout his experience through the Holocaust he continues to become angry with God. He began to quit praying again because he did not know what to say to him. He said, “How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces?” (Wiesel, 1972). Wiesel also stated that he didn’t fast on Yom Kippur and said that he felt a great void opening. Although it was seeming as if he lost his faith and did not have as well of a relationship with God that he had before the Holocaust, he found himself forming a prayer inside of his head when Rabbi Eliahu’s son disappeared. It can also be seen that Wiesel eventually regained his theology with relationship with God when he gave his acceptance speech for his Nobel Peace Prize and thanked God for receiving the award.

In his memoir Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levy talks about the difference between “the drowned” and “the saved”. To Levy, “the drowned” formed the backbone of the camp and were an anonymous mass that was continually renewed and always identical of people who were no longer people who marched and worked in silence. Levy even said, “One hesitates to call them living. One hesitates to call to call their death death.” (Levy, 2008). Levy even said that to sink like “the drowned” was the easiest of matters. They would do enough to carry out all of the orders received, only ate their rations, and observed the discipline of the work and the camp. According to Levi, “the drowned” were the ones in the camp who did not adapt at all such as learning the German language so that they could understand what was being said to them. “The saved” on the other hand were the Jews and other prisoners that adapted to survive in the conditions of Auschwitz. These were the individuals who learned how to achieve extra rations, participated in the camp’s black market, and were lucky enough to form relationships with people who were in positions of authority. Choosing the path of “the saved” was not easy by any means though. A common way that people joined the group of “the saved” was becoming a doctor, cook, or night guard, but the majority of the people who were in “the saved” joined based on their willpower. Levi then gives examples of people who were in Auschwitz with him and what they did to be in “the saved”. For example he talks about Elias Lindzin and how his charismatic tendencies and his reputation as a hard worker allowed him to be used only for special projects These two labels that Levi used to describe the people in the camp was significant because according to Levi there was not a middle ground between these two labels inside the camp.

The way that Levi talks about God, I do not get the indication that Levi is religious. For one, in the beginning of the memoir when he was captured, he identified as an Italian citizen of the Jewish race. The only reason why he identified as part of the Jewish race was because he thought he would be tortured and killed of his political activity as being part of a resistance movement. Another piece of evidence that lead me to believe that Levi was not religious was in his memoir in Chapter 13 when he talks about Kuhn praying out loud after not being selected during the selection. Levi says, “Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again.” (Levi, 2008). He even said that if he was God, he would spit at Kuhn’s prayer. This led me to believe that he was not religious and believed that if there was a God that there would not be an Auschwitz.

Survival testimonies are essentially to understanding the Holocaust and never forgetting the atrocities that occurred over the span of all the years that the Holocaust took place and all of the events that took place leading up to it. By getting these survival testimonies, we are able to spread awareness to future generations of what happened, and this part is essential because in the year 2019 there are not many Holocaust survivors left to give their testimonies which makes these testimonies more crucial than ever. There have been many formats that these testimonies can be given. One way is the survivors could tell others and family members about their encounters and then these individuals can get their story out to the public like the man that came and talked to our class about his grandmother’s Holocaust survival testimony. Another way of getting survival testimonies was in the way of the Shoah foundation which was founded by Steven Spielberg through USC. This foundation recorded countless hours of survivor testimonies from victims of the Holocaust and have been able to give us a first-hand account experience on what happened during the Holocaust. Another way that Spielberg was able to show survival testimonies was through film such as Schindler’s List. By making this movie and following the format of the movie and seemingly putting Oskar Schindler as the center of the story, he was actually able to make a movie about the Holocaust and put the Schindler Jews at the forefront of the story and share their story through film.

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