Similarities Between In My Hands And Night By Elie Wiesel

War is an awful thing. War makes people do terrible things. While war can form great bonds between people, war destroys greater bonds between people and nations. The books In My Hands, and Night, both tell the tales of what happened during the massacre of the Jews. During WWII, many Jews were captured and put into concentration camps by the Nazis in Germany and were later killed. In My Hands is about Irene and how she survived pretending to be a German girl, while she was actually Polish, and how she helped out the Jews during that time and how she saved 11 of them from the massacre. Night is about a boy named Elie Wiesel and how he and his family were put into Auschwitz, the concentration camp and how he survived it. The natural state of humanity …show more content…
War shapes our humanity by making us more evil. War makes us do irrational and inhumane things to stay alive. When we are at war we are in survive mode, we will do anything to keep us alive such as listen to dictatorial authority and even kill others if necessary in order to survive. War brings out the worst in people by making them do inhumane and evil things. In the story In My Hands, Irene watches a Nazi grab a mother’s baby, throw it up in the air, use it for target practice. Then he shoots the horrified mother. From this experience Irene wrote, “I saw an officer make a flinging movement with his arm, and something rose into the sky like a fat bird. With his other hand he aimed his pistol, and the bird plummeted to the ground beside its screaming mother, and the officer shot the mother too. But it was not a bird. It was not a bird. It was not a bird”(Source A). This quote is showing how the …show more content…
In source c, a quote reads, “Friends helped take up the floorboards, under the rug, and build a hiding place in case of raids”(Source C). This quote is showing how they are in the war and helping each other out to survive and not get caught by the German Nazis. They are random people who are hunted by the same enemy, so they are working together to keep alive. People making friends from war. Though this would help prove that war brings out the best in people this is not correct because you see people with friends who help each other out all the time. When something bad is happening, war or no war, friends help each other out. Because of this, this quote does not prove that war brings out the best in people, they were just acting like they would if there was no war, It didn’t have an effect on them in his situation. Another reason someone might argue that war doesn’t make people worse is because of the bystander effect. The bystander effect is when someone is hurt, laying on the ground, or seems in pain, most people will be bystanders unless they personally know the person hurt, or it is their job to help. A bystander is someone who does not add or join in to something, but does not prevent it or help either. The bystander effect shows us that most people will not help out if you do not personally know them or nobody tells