This experience of the Holocaust affect me on an emotional level. Before this experience I did not know much about the Holocaust I just had heard of horrible man named Adolf Hitler and the genocide he had created. After reading the book Night and after the documentaries and films that we watched I've been slapped by reality. I've been dwelling a lot on my own as well, about how people could have so much hatred on the people who are their neighbors. Just ordinary people that have so much hatred. I'm just so confused how people could just back stab their neighbors as soon as a new political party rose. Ordinary people turning into monsters you don't see that everyday. I've taken away so many things from this unit. I think the thing that just draws me the most from in this unit is to never forget. So many innocent people died just because of what they practiced and what they look like. So the least I can do is memorialize them by never forgetting what happened to them. Genocides are just horrible things that happen all around the world each day. We have to stop them as a human race not as individuals from different places. I was also brought into deep thought about the topic of being humane to the Jews during the holocaust. Being humane to the Jews was the least people could do and yet many people, most people did not show respect and treated them as the way to Hitler taught them to. Only a small population of people fought Hitler inside of Germany and other countries that Germany had invalidated. I remember connections in reading in Night how one of the overseers was removed from his job because he was too humane. He was too smart for Hitler's brainwash. Also when we watched Life is Beautiful I noticed that the doctor treated his old waiter friend nicely. Just the feeling of somebody treating another person nicely in a time of crisis just made me feel bittersweet it made me think that the not the world has hatred. Sometimes I wish that I was back in Germany during the Holocaust helping Jews. But then I think to myself what if I would been brainwashed too.
Night presents many ideas and creates many themes along the way. One that I really took notice of was the theme of the importance of family, not just to Elie but to so many people experiencing the same things as him. In the preface Elie mentions witnessing his father being beaten to death and that experience being one of the most mentally crippling things he experienced during the Holocaust. Elie was near his father while this was taking place but an SS officer was nearby as well. “"Well?" The SS had flown into a rage and was striking my father on the head: "Be quiet, old man! Be quiet!" My father no longer felt the club's blows; I did. And yet I did not react. I let the SS beat my father, I left him alone in the clutches of death. Worse: I was angry with him for having been noisy, for having cried, for provoking the wrath of the SS. "Eliezer! Eliezer! Come, don't leave me a l o n e … " His voice had reached me from so far away, from so close. Bu...
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