Female guards in Nazi concentration camps

Smith’s article ‘There’s More to Life Than Being Happy’ (The Atlantic: June 2013) discusses the ideas in a book written by Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist who was a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl concludes that camp prisoners who had found meaning in their life were more satisfied and therefore more likely to survive. Those that had merely been happy in life found it harder to keep a good morale and were less…

The term Holocaust refers to Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of European Jews. In the 1850s, European Jews were facing a new form of anti-Jewish prejudice. This hostility and discrimination of Jews came to be known as anti-Semitism. The huge amounts of suffering that took place after the Great Depression and World War I caused several people to search for someone to blame. The theory of anti-Semitism helped many Germans to find the pride they had lost before. Adolf Hitler was a key figure in…

innocent people were killed in death camps by brutal torture treatments. Despite the Nazi-stricken continent, heroism and courage could still be found in many people. Between the years of 1939 and 1945, evil was clearly portrayed in the European countries when over four million innocent Jews were executed in concentration and death camps. The horror began when Adolf Hitler was put into power in 1933. In the beginning of Hitler’s reign of Germany, the concentration camps weren’t built primarily…

school and up because of the maturity level it takes to read such tragedies. This book, even though it is marked as a fable, has many great lessons and themes that all people need to enjoy such as love in the midst of hate, and the true affect of the Nazi occupation. The holocaust is a sad time in this world, and very few people who lived through it are still alive; therefore, we need to understand and remember what happened. This book did a great job explaining what occurred through an easy to…

Night is an account written by Elie Wiesel. Elie writes about his own life experiences during the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, and about all the terrifying memories he had dealing with the death of his family. He was only a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in Sighet. During this time they felt as if they needed to give up, or as if it was too much to go through. Elie was one of the very few that survived during this time. Some believe he lived in…

betrays them and they are robbed. The gates of their small community get locked and no one enters only exits. After a couple years’ madness has spread throughout the ghetto, and her brother Laibele gets tuberculosis. Her mother is then taken away in a Nazi raid because she seems to be ill and not fit to work, after her mother’s deportation a social worker tries to find new homes for the children, potentially separating them. Riva fights against them and later becomes the guardian of her…

Moral Courage in Work Camps Today When one thinks of concentration camps, he or she thinks of the Holocaust and that concentration camps are a thing of the past. However, there are still horrendous concentration camps similar to the ones during the Holocaust existing in the world today. In 1959, the Kaechon political prison camp was created in the center of North Korea. The camp is also known as Camp 14, and it is believed to imprison 15,000 people who are life sentenced. Most of these…

Mary W. Shelley once said “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” The book Night, a memoir on Eliezer Wiesel life in several Auschwitz Concentration Camps, Eliezer faced many challenges throughout the book an example being the death of his Mother, Father, and sister. All of the challenges he faced shaped and changed Elie in a way that affected him throughout his life. This shows that when we are faced with problems we try to adapt and change to solve them. In the…

average have to make an emergency department visit for assault. There are 16,000 homicides per year on average. Cruelty follows people in life, regardless of where they are or who they are. In the book, Night, Elie Wiesel tells the horrors of concentration camps from his point of view as a survivor. In the novel, In Cold Blood, Truman Capote shines a new light on the 1959 murder of the Herbert Clutter family in the small community of Holcomb, Kansas. In both of these texts inhumanity is shown in…

Abuse, starvation, lice, dehydration, neglect. Cramped in a small room with others for months. The smells, the disease. You may think that a prison or even a slaughterhouse is being described, but no. These examples are common practice among slave ships travelling across the Middle Passage - that I witnessed while aboard - which transports not only goods but live human beings from the west coast of Africa. This deplorable action of overcrowding and harassment must be stopped from all ships…