Holocaust
The Cut for Survival Was Made on the Second Hand
Survival in the Holocaust concentration camps meant something different for every human being who lived as a prisoner. And it meant the same. Survival meant enduring dread, fear, pain, starvation, exhaustion, and debasement. Survival required ever increasing degrees of physical, mental, and emotional adaptation and tolerance. Survival meant ever-increasing extremes of degradation in every realm -- degradation of faith, hope, strength, standards. And survival meant being lucky at every turn, in every moment, with each breath. In And The Sun Still Dared to Shine, Peter Scheponik wrote about surviving and survival. To those who are free, the words are the relatively same. To those featured in the poems "Afterlife," Love Photos," and "Punishment," the cut made between surviving and survival happened on the second hand.
The hands of the Nazis doled out cruelty and held chance loosely, as in a game. To a Nazi, taking life was easy and expected. To give life back again, after "everything went black/blacker than the swastikas / and boxcar journey / blacker than the night sky […] a sinking blackness that / seemed liked death" (lines 9-11, 14 -- 15) was part of the game that caused "SS sneers" (line 19) and, one would assume, laughter and derision. Pleasure was derived from returning a Jew to the unbearable state of surviving and to the...
The physicality of pain, the hunger, the feces and spit, all the brutalities that served to dehumanize them became precisely what brought the survivors out of the camps alive. Many if not most survivors were purely lucky. All learned how to live with dehumanization: to live while being dehumanized. All were able to resist succumbing to the belief that they were truly inhuman creatures, and all rose above and re-humanized
Holocaust affected Israeli society and culture and how Jews memorialize/Remember it today There exists no doubt regarding the massacre of the Jews during the phase of World War II and its impact on the lives of the Jewish people and the people who were near and dear to them. A dissention is required against those who assert that the tragedy never occurred, irrespective of whether they hold an opposite perspective
Judaism in Kafka The highly allegorical language Kafka uses in his literary work is leading the reader into looking for clues as to their interpretation in Kafka's real world. Looking into the history of the Jews of Prague, one will find traces of their ancient struggles with themselves as well as with the rest of the world in Kafkian stories and characters like Odradek, in "The Cares of A Family Man,"
Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 9 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.4B: Responding to Literature Modern British Poetry Lesson 6 Journal Entry # 10 of 13 Journal Exercise 6.5A: Responding to Literature The poem was written in 1919, which is immediately after the First World War. I think that Yeats is, on one hand, enthusiastic about the end of the world and the coming of a new era. On the other hand, I think he is
In "Piaf," Pam Gems provides a view into the life of the great French singer and arguably the greatest singer of her generation -- Edith Piaf. (Fildier and Primack, 1981), the slices that the playwright provides, more than adequately trace her life. Edith was born a waif on the streets of Paris (literally under a lamp-post). Abandoned by her parents -- a drunken street singer for a mother and a
Auschwitz gave to Promo Levi when he dared to ask the "Why?" question. To be sure, the guard was simply attempting to be cynical and sarcastic rather than reflective or philosophical, but LaCapra is also critical of Claude Lanzmann for failing to ask this question enough in Shoah. All of the Germans who Lanzmann interviewed were either perpetrators of complicit bystanders, and they spent a great deal of time
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