Final Blog Post - Ella

Among the experiences that Elie Wiesel writes about, inhumanity plays one of the largest roles as a theme. This, in part, is due to racist propaganda spread during the time of the Holocaust. Many, without the urging of Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazi party figures, would not have caried these atrocious acts out. In the United States Holocuast Memorial Museum, one of the first exhibits presented to the visitor, is a hall, along which various forms and types of Nazi propoganda are on display. This included “scientific” research and charts about hair, eye color, and nose shape, posters and flyers denouncing the Jewish people along with their art and literature, even going to the extent of school children’s textbooks with anti-semitic propaganda, portraying the Jewish people with almost charicatures. The guards in places such as Buna, Buchenwald, or any of the three of Auschwitz were incredibly inhumane in their actions, treating people as though they are nothing but cattle, as though their lives didn’t matter. These actions would most likely not have happened, at least not on a larger scale if it were not the vision of Nazi leaders. We see this in the beginning of the film Life is Beautiful. Though main character Guido Orefice lives in an extremely German occupied part of Italy throughout World War 2 and the start of the Holocaust, many were kind or at the very least, somewhat indifferent to him. But as the film goes on, the viewer is shown a growing number of times that many are inhumane to Guido’s older uncle. To me, part of the inhumanity was also about stripping away the Jewish people’s dignity, reducing them to less than human, to the point that they are almost ashamed of their religion. This began early on in the memoir Night, when the people of Elie Wiesel’s town are forced to wear a yellow star of David, where they are then packed together into small cattle cars, some later tricked into death by gas chamber. Those who managed to survive, or were able to avoid the gas chambers, also faced the crematoria. At the end of the memoir, one of the last things they were forced to do, was to fight for food in small train cars when being transferred to a different camp, in an attempt to take away the last of their humanity. In this time the Jewish people in occasion stripped of their clothes, and unable to bathe and feed themselves properly. The Nazis were also inhumane in the forced work given to the prisoners. It was truly barbaric in the ways they killed and disposed of the prisoners once they could work no longer. In some extermination camps, how the Nazi party could stand to make the prisoners dig their own graves, and use their children as target practice, is beyond me. Today, inhumaneness still happens, albeit on a much smaller scale. Wars are still waged, for the fact that one’s religion or practices are different than your own. To me it seems inhumane to deny people seeking asylum from entering the country. Politically it makes sense, but morally it seems without compassion. People caught in the crossfire of cartels and gangs, not necessarily committing any wrong doings, are being refused from a sanctuary in which they would be able to create a prosperous life. In some cases, these people are also being deported back to what they fought and traveled to escape from. With this comes the importance of seeing the results of inhumaneness in the Holocaust, so as to check ourselves, and to see that we are unable to reach that extent and extreme again. It then becomes our job to never forget, never ignore, because in catasrophies such as the Holocaust, a bystander is almost as lethal as the offender.