Judenrat

Formal Reading Response 3 Ida Fink’s A Scrap of Time and Other Stories is a collage of fictional short stories about polish Jews during the Holocaust, each told from different perspectives, which combine to form a truly moving narrative. Similar to Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi and This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories is written in a loose, episodic format. It does not tell a linear story from beginning to end, which means it is…

The dictionary definition of euthanasia is the “the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma”. While euthanasia is synonymous to the term “mercy killing”, it is illegal in most of the states in the USA. In the late 1930s and early 1940s in Germany, though, this act was legal. Its accessibility drew in Adolf Hitler, leading to the formation of Aktion T4, a forced euthanasia program with the intentions of killing the incurably ill,…

Hannah Arendt is German Jew who emigrated to the United States. Arendt became a reporter for The New Yorker who covered the Eichmann trial in 1961. It was originally her idea to attend the trial and she felt that “she owed it to herself as a social critic, displaced person, witness and survivor” (Arendt xi) to be present for it. The articles that she wrote pertaining to the trial she eventually made into a book. The thesis of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report of the Banality of Evil is…

passing by, no matter gender or age, and sometimes they would leave them severely injured.Once the Nazis gained full control over Poland, people 's freedom was cut to a sliver. Nazis had put people in secluded areas to live that were organized by the Judenrat, these were called ghettos. They made many ghettos and people had to be moved several times, to even more harsh ghettos. Hitler ordered the “Germanization” of Polish territory. German people started filling in the homes of Poland and their…

Schindler’s List takes place in the Polish city of Krakow and many of the German-owned enamelware factories that Schindler used throughout Western Poland and Germany. The movie took place in the 1940s when WWII was dominating Europe and the Nazis had total control of most of the continent, Poland was part of this massive facist dictatorship. The movie begins at the time when the Nazis began forcing the Polish Jews to move into ghettos. Oskar Schindler, a man who was a member of the Nazi party,…

Although those conscripted into forced labor had to endure many hardships, those who beared the brunt of the trauma were the persecuted. Those who were monotonously hunted by the Nazis faced the most arduous challenges of any group during the war. For them, the occupation was not a slight alteration to daily life, it was a complete transformation of their very existence. The ultimate goal of nazification of the Netherlands couldn’t be completed without the total extermination of the gypsies,…

“Whoever Saves a Life, Saves the World” What it means to be human isn’t something you often think about. In the Judenrat activity I was put in a very foreign, but a very real situation. I was forced to pick who lived and who died, if the lives of a few did actually outweigh the lives of many, even if the lives of the few are helpless children and elderly people. To be human means you have the ability to feel and understand, if we can’t do that then we’re no different from animals. Or so I…

Chaim Rumkowski Many observe and critique Chaim Rumkowski’s life when studying the Holocaust. His unusual story offers a unique vantage point, as this man was not a high ranking Nazi official or a fleeing fugitive, but instead the appointed Judenrat Chairman of the Lodz Ghetto. This position of power directly under Hans Biebow’s Nazi ghetto administration defined his role during World War Two and is the reason his life story has much to offer when it comes to the relationship between Nazis and…

In The Cunning of History, author Richard Rubenstein discusses the elements within Germany and other countries of the world that contributed to the mass killings of the Jews in what we know as the Holocaust. Rubenstein further discusses the history of anti-Semitism that enabled the persecution of the Jews, and also compares the slave industry of the world wherein the importation and persecution of slaves in the United States and other parts of the world had existed pre-Holocaust. Rubenstein…