Night by Elie Wiesel Critique Essay

Cattle cars. Burning bodies. Auschwitz. These words are engraved in the mind of every Jewish person on Earth. After decades, Holocaust survivors still have nightmares about these thoughts. One word, one indescribable word, will forever stay with these people. Holocaust. Many people of the Jewish faith realize the power of that word, but many others still need to learn. A man is sitting peacefully in his home; he has no worries, even when Nazi soldiers dragged him into the horrendous ghettos. He also willfully went into cattle cars, and then finally into Auschwitz. This is where that man realized that his life became horrible.

Throughout the months in the work camp, throughout all of the suffering, his will to survive surpassed the will to kill of Nazi soldiers. Years later, people know that events like the Holocaust will, and are happening right now, such as the Bosnian Genocide 1992. Education also will get rid of the desire for power in human beings. Educating students about the Holocaust, and other genocides, will help prevent genocides in future generations. Man has the will to survive and surpass evil like the Holocaust survivors, genocides like this will happen again, and education will help prevent genocides in the future.

In the face of evil man can surpass the death that evil brings upon it. In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, he describes the event of selection which occurs every two weeks. Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. (Elie Wiesel) This quote symbolizes Elie’s first selection in Auschwitz.

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As he and his father follow the lines to the selection process, they walk by flames consuming live babies. This part in the book made me wince because just the thought of babies being burned can make even the toughest person get to the brink of tears. Once at the entrance to Auschwitz he faces a guard who asks questions about him. He passes the first selection and so does his father, but sadly this is the place where he leaves his mother and little sister, Tzipora, forever. After many years, Elie realizes that they were probably taken to the crematoriums right away. fter living in the concentration camps for a while they go through their next selection process. Every time the selection process comes around Elie and his father escape with their lives, while others aren’t as lucky and get sent to the crematoriums. Every time they were capable of working and they were healthy so he and his father were let off. Every time they passed the selection, they surpassed evil because of the Nazi soldiers. These Nazi soldiers wanted reason to kill people, and sometimes they did it without reason.

They surpassed the death evil brought upon them by having the will to get through the selection process, and they knew that as long as they had each other each would have the will to survive and live another day. People believe the lie that events like the Holocaust will not happen again. This is a lie because genocides have occurred in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Cambodia, and others. In all of these genocides one race had the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

In the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina the Serbs led a genocide against the Muslims in Bosnia. 200,000 Muslims were systematically murdered in this genocide. Beginning on April 6, 1994 the Hutu militia led a genocide against the Tutsis and the means of killing were clubs and machetes. As many as 10,000 civilians were murdered a day. In the one hundred day genocide 800,000 people were murdered. In Cambodia the leader of Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge attempted to make a communist peasant farming society, and in the process killed 25% of the population of Cambodia by means of overworking, starvation, and executions.

As you can see there have been many genocides over the years after the Holocaust, but these were the most devastating and brutal. Education will help our students learn the horrors of the Holocaust, and will hopefully prevent genocides like it from future generations. By showing our students the atrocities of the Holocaust all of them will say that something like this could never happen again, and if it did how would the world let it happen. There are many things taught in schools, colleges, and even classes for older people out of school to help them learn about the Holocaust and how to prevent genocides like it in the future.

These efforts assume that learning about genocides will prevent its recurrence. However there are still genocides happening, like the ones I described in the paragraph above, so something about genocide education is wrong. There is a disjuncture about what people are teaching, and what is actually happening. In my opinion we need to do a better job teaching about the prevention of genocides. Doing this will hopefully make a big impact on the future, so nothing like the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia ever happen again.

As you can see if man can survive the evil wrath, and surpass death with their will to survive, and even after educated people on the Holocaust, genocides like it have happened again and again. The holocaust has taught me a lot about the world around me, and from it I also learned that I should appreciate everything that I have because it can all be taken away in a second like the Jewish race. It also helped me learn about other holocausts and what we need to do to prevent it. We need to ask ourselves this question, if genocides are happening after the Holocaust, what are we supposed to do to prevent them?

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