NightEssay Preview: NightReport this essayIn 1944, in the village of Sighet, Romania, twelve-year-old Elie Wiesel spends much time and emotion on the Talmud and on Jewish mysticism. His instructor, Moshe the Beadle, returns from a near-death experience and warns that Nazi aggressors will soon threaten the serenity of their lives. However, even when anti-Semitic measures force the Sighet Jews into supervised ghettos, Elies family remains calm and compliant. In spring, authorities begin shipping trainloads of Jews to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex. Elies family is part of the final convoy. In a cattle car, eighty villagers can scarcely move and have to survive on minimal food and water. One of the deportees, Madame SchÐchter, becomes hysterical with visions of flames and furnaces.
Mädchen Schönberg, “Aryan War: A Short Film in Hungarian Film Noir and Radio Drama” (Nurnen, August 2010), 30.
In 1945, the Belsen camp opened for the first time and was named one of the worst extermination camps in history. The camps were the third largest in the world and were the largest concentration camp on the planet after Auschwitz and concentration camps in the West. Over the past eight years, in response to Soviet-imposed communism, hundreds of thousands of Jews were brutally killed at mass grave sites around the West, including more than 7,000 in the eastern half of Ukraine. The largest concentration camp at Sobibor, which served as the main extermination site from 1945-1946, closed in 1945. Although the death toll was 1,000 Jews, many came to live in the ghettos and villages and to live alongside their families and even the other camp residents. In many instances during the winter, victims were able to flee into a nearby town, while others were forced to take them to their deaths in their own homes. Many families were killed by gunfire and in early 1946, two of the Belsen children, Yematia and Leila Bekch, were shot dead immediately upon arrival to Buchenwald’s new barracks, where other children lived in fear. In some cases, relatives and a friend found these children in the ruins of dead families. In one case, a relative allegedly shot a young Adolf Hitler outside a home. During the war, the Nazis deliberately kept Jewish children in the camp with an “anti-German propaganda” campaign. These children, who were often killed on arrival, were repeatedly tortured and later sent to hospitals to die. For decades to come, after many years of living near the camp’s camps, many of these children were killed at the hands of their peers and family members. The survivors are often left behind after being released, and the perpetrators often claim that they were children raised in the Holocaust. In a film by Theodor Leger in the 1970s, German journalist Erwin Rommel describes the atrocities during World War II at Auschwitz. It is his book The Holocaust: Rethinking the Holocaust that is the most chilling of all.
Lecture “An Exaggerated Nazi Germany on Film” (Amsterdam, August 2012), pp. 8–11.
An Exaggerated Nazi Germany in the 1940s on Film, by the distinguished Austrian professor and philosopher Peter Kölner, includes interviews with both the filmmakers and the historian.
From a young age, Peter Kölner learned to appreciate that there was no question of extermination in their film; he also learned how to speak effectively. In one remarkable interview, he recounted one episode of Auschwitz from his childhood as a child. Kölner recounted that the film’s opening credits clearly mentioned killing and destruction of about 120,000 victims. After the film was released, it got
At midnight on the third day of their deportation, the group looks in horror at flames rising above huge ovens and gags at the stench of burning flesh. Guards wielding billy clubs force Elies group through a selection of those fit to work and those who face a grim and improbable future. Elie and his father Chlomo lie about their ages and depart with other hardy men to Auschwitz, a concentration camp. Elies mother and three sisters disappear into Birkenau, the death camp. After viewing infants being tossed in a burning pit, Elie rebels against God, who remains silent.
Every day, Elie and Chiomo struggle to keep their health so they can remain in the work force. Sadistic guards and trustees exact capricious punishments. After three weeks, Elie and his father are forced to march to Buna, a factory in the Auschwitz complex, where they sort electrical parts in an electronics warehouse. The savagery reaches its height when the guards hang a childlike thirteen year old, who dies slowly before Elies eyes.
Despairing, Elie grows morose during Rosh Hashanah services. At the next selection, the doctor culls Chlomo from abler men. Chlomo, however, passes