Analysis Of God After The Holocaust By Sassoon

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The ones who abandoned their faith during war found peace in other possessions rather than God, but after war, the recovery of the horrors they witnessed came from finding faith again as a stimulus to heal their past. The article “God after the Holocaust” explains that by continuing to deny God’s existence and abandon Him would be admitting defeat to the Nazis. The article stresses that God works in mysterious ways in everyone’s life and the Holocaust is just an event that cannot be justified, but through faith survivors can forget the memories from the Holocaust. The article “God after the Holocaust” argues that survivors’ experiences in the Holocaust taught the survivors valuable lessons that challenge them to trust in God again when it states, “The Holocaust taught us humility, and not to stand by, but to oppose evil. Sometimes, in this, God slips through. The question is, are we willing to settle for these few moments, and what happens the rest of the time in this chaotic world?” (Baron, Shraga). The author stresses that there is no explanation for why the Holocaust happened, but with God a sense of peace and stability can be restored for the survivors if they choose faith over revenge. Wiesel’s recovery after the Holocaust did not come in the form of revenge, but instead in a testimony to challenge others to seek God, even when faced with misunderstanding, in other words when God seems as if He has abandoned them. The survivor’s in the Holocaust recovery through testimony is evident in the Social Issues in Literature: Night when it states, “Some survivors try to recover a sense of humanity; others try to recover a relation to the divinity. All struggle to recover a sense of meaning and value . . . That we have these testimonies demonstrates the abiding trace of indifference of something infinitely precious, despite the Nazi attempt to annihilate it. The one who could not find a listener now asks us to listen. Therefore, we become a part of the Jews project to return to life: we are turned into messengers” (142). The way which the survivors of the Holocaust move on is by sharing their experiences in the Holocaust with the rest of the world to show that God is not to blame for the Holocaust and to prevent such an evil from occurring again. Similarly, Wiesel expresses that the Holocaust has not torn away his relationship with God, but instead strengthened his understanding of God in an interview with Bob Costas when it states, “Bob Costas asks: If there is a God, how does God allow something like the Holocaust to happen? Elie Wiesel replies: I do not know. If there is an answer, it is the wrong answer. But you see it is wrong, I think, to put everything on God’s shoulders. That is something I understood later. Where was man? Where …show more content…
Wiesel stresses that God is not the reason the Holocaust took place because it was man kind’s evil action. God’s reasons and plans are mysterious and the Holocaust remains a question that cannot be answered by man. In a like manner, the article “About Siegfried Sassoon” expresses that Sassoon’s poetry in World War I provoked religious beliefs, but after World War I he began turning back to God to find peace from the horrors of war, which is evident when it states, “Sassoon became religious, something he had never previously been, and he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1957, strongly influenced by figures such as Dame Felicitas Corrigan and Dom Philip Jebb. Most of his later poetry was inspired by this new force in his life” (“About Siegfried Sassoon”). Originally, Sassoon had admitted that he had never prayed to God during World War I in Perspective on World War I Poetry but after the war he was led back to God by converting from Judaism to Catholicism. Thus, prisoners of war in the Holocaust reconciled with God once they realized God was not the reason for mankind’s destruction because man has a free will in which they can choose their actions, and soldiers who wrote poetry in World War I also found God after war once they became aware that God did not cause the

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