This past week we looked at so much suffering. From the tales from the ghetto in Jacob the Liar to Nomberg-Przytyk’s vivid tales of pain from Auschwitz a common theme was not only pain, but manipulation through fear. Nomberg-Przytyk, throughout her narratives, occasionally asks the question “why did the Jews go so quietly,” (Nomberg-Przytyk 33)? Though I know I cannot get all of the answers from these two sources, I have tried to search for ways in which the Nazis used the fear of psychological and physical suffering to manipulate the Jews. In Jacob the Liar, the Nazis used intimidation, as well as slave labor to demoralize the Jews and control them. Though the Nazis would probably be able to control the Jews in the movie’s ghetto through
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Nomberg-Przytyk asked in “The Roar of the Beast”, “What did they havr to lose?” thereby raising the valid point that if people were going to die, she believed that they should not do it quietly (Nomberg-Przytyk 34). However, in reading these narratives, I have found that the victims had three kinds of deaths. The first are the new arrivals and “they simply did not know,” that they were going to be exterminated. The second kind of death was the kind described as, “those who had gone through a few weeks of beatings, hunger, maltreatment, and the loss of feeling and humanity were incapable of resisting,” and as such death seemed like a way to end their suffering (Nomberg-Przytyk 34). The final kind of death in Auschwitz was to fight and be killed. In “Revenge of a Dancer” the French dancer’s murder of the SS guards and subsequent suicide is viewed as heroic by the other Jews. Magda even says, “that’s how you’re supposed to die,” illustrating how fighting back, even in the face of certain death is heroic in this context (Nomberg-Przytyk 109). Moreover, the dancer’s choice to take her own life is powerful in the sense that she holds on to enough agency to control her own death in the context in which almost every Jewish death in Auschwitz was through no choice of their
Nomberg-Przytyk asked in “The Roar of the Beast”, “What did they havr to lose?” thereby raising the valid point that if people were going to die, she believed that they should not do it quietly (Nomberg-Przytyk 34). However, in reading these narratives, I have found that the victims had three kinds of deaths. The first are the new arrivals and “they simply did not know,” that they were going to be exterminated. The second kind of death was the kind described as, “those who had gone through a few weeks of beatings, hunger, maltreatment, and the loss of feeling and humanity were incapable of resisting,” and as such death seemed like a way to end their suffering (Nomberg-Przytyk 34). The final kind of death in Auschwitz was to fight and be killed. In “Revenge of a Dancer” the French dancer’s murder of the SS guards and subsequent suicide is viewed as heroic by the other Jews. Magda even says, “that’s how you’re supposed to die,” illustrating how fighting back, even in the face of certain death is heroic in this context (Nomberg-Przytyk 109). Moreover, the dancer’s choice to take her own life is powerful in the sense that she holds on to enough agency to control her own death in the context in which almost every Jewish death in Auschwitz was through no choice of their