...Although the Holocaust took place almost half a century ago, it still leaves behind profound repercussions not only on its direct survivors, but also on their descendants – the second generation. In her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch coins the term “postmemory” to describe how parents can pass on their traumatic memories to their children, and how these memories consequently become an integral part of their lives and their identities. Indeed, biographies and psychoanalytical research have proven that many descendants of Holocaust survivors display psychological symptoms similar to those of their parents, despite the fact that they were born many years after the Holocaust. Although many critics insist that postmemory does not qualify as actual memory because the children have not lived through the Holocaust themselves, postmemory is indeed a legitimate form of memory. Furthermore, when compared to memory, postmemory is equally traumatizing and painful. Although postmemory is a frequent theme in many works from and on the second generation, its validity is still debated. Hirsch first defines the term as the relationship between the second generation and the memories they inherit from their parents by means of stories, images and behaviors among which they grew up. Karein Goertz, in her essay “Transgenerational Representations of the Holocaust: From Memory to ‘Post-Memory’” also describes postmemory as “a hybrid...
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...ignorance is bliss, all we really succeed in doing is blinding ourselves to the truth, but even in the darkest of times and among demons we seem to find some shed of hope and light. Ruth Kluger and Primo Levi are able to express their darkest and hopeful moments and thoughts through their exquisite and precise wording of their memoirs. Ruth Kluger’s memoir is titled Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood...
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...Jews and went into hiding for two years. Her novel contains her writings about this time and her experiences and encounters. Some of these experiences portrayed the depth of despair into which she occasionally sunk into during her continuous confinement, “I’ve reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die,” (Frank, 184) she writes on February 3, 1944. There are also instances in which she expresses her helplessness, “The world will keep on turning without me, and I can’t do anything to change events anyway” (Frank, 184). However, through her writing Anne is able to maintain her sanity and her spirits, “If I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn,” (Frank, 184) she writes on April 5, 1944. At 15 Anne and her family were found and sent to Nazi concentration camps, where she succumbed to typhus. The diary she wrote during the Holocaust, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” has been read by millions and Anne has achieved posthumous world fame. In Marjane's novel, Persepolis readers can interpret many characteristics about the author and main character Marjane. At just ten years old Marjane grew up during the Cultural Revolution in Iran. Satrapi was the only child of her parents, Her father Ebi Satrapi was an engineer and her mother Taji Satrapi was a clothing designer. She grew up in Tehran, where she attended the Lycee Francais. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Marjane and her family's Western attributes drew the wrong kind of attention and were forced to change...
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...Penn State HIST 121 Term Paper 23 April 2014 Children of the Holocaust This research essay is about the devastating and gruesome incidents pertaining to the children of the holocaust. This essay will cover the unbelievable lives these children had to live and the horrible pain they had to undergo threw this war of extermination. They suffered losses of family, friends, and many became orphaned or homeless. The holocaust took the lives of about 6 million Jewish men, women, and children. There were about 1.6 million Jewish children consisting from infants to teens living in Europe around the start of World War 2. Only about 11 percent of this range of children made it through the war. A lot of the parents chose to hide their children so they would have a better chance of surviving. The Jewish children were extremely discriminated against and were terribly affected by the Holocaust. Jewish children, along with their families, experienced persecution of revocation of citizenship, reduction of food ration, confiscations, deprivation of schooling and restricted access to public institutions. Many people could not figure out why the Jewish children were hated, or why they had to be prisoners. These children were left homeless and many orphaned. They had seen the Nazis murder their parents, siblings, relatives, and close friends. They had to endure starvation, sickness, and awful labor and other brutal acts until they were sent to gas chambers at the camps. Hiding a child...
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...During the Holocaust, many people, especially Jews have perished during that time. Some lived to tell the tale, but the many people that died will linger until the end of time. But it’s mostly the teens that might have faced more difficult situations than the adults. Teens faced many effects negatively on their obstacles, family lives, and even their health during the Holocaust. Teens first face their fears with the Holocaust as obstacles both physically and mentally. They experience persecution, also known as abuse. “Though the pace and severity of persecution differed in each country, Jews were marked, vilified, and segregated from their neighbors.” (USHMM, 2004). Besides the spread of disease and the force of separation, teens and children...
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...She later then invites Liesel to read at her library. Hans kept the promise he made to the man who saved his life and hid a jew named Max Vandenburg in his basement. Max and Liesel become close friends, Max writes two stories about his friendship will Liesel which is used in the novel. Liesel later loses hope and realizes that Hitler's propaganda is the blame for the war, the holocaust and the death of her biological family. Leisel is encouraged to write, which leads her to writing the story of her life in the Hubermanns basement, where she survives an air raid that kills Hans, Rosa,and Rudy. The depiction of life in Nazi Germany in The Book Thief is accurate, specifically regarding many Jews were being hidden and protected by the Germans from the Nazi, anti-semitism was being spread, and parents were forced to send their children Hitler youth...
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...Why do the survivors of such a tragic event such as the Holocaust want to remember those horrifying times by writing about memories that most people would only want to forget? I will show, Weisel has talked about, and as others have written, that the victims of the holocaust wrote about their experiences not only to preserve the history of the event, but so that those who were not involved and those who did survive can understand what really happened. They wanted the people of the world to realize how viciously they were treated. On top of wanting us to understand, they also want to understand why this happened. Why did the Lord let this happen? Why did the people of the world stand by and let such a thing happen to so many people? Today in the 90's we cannot think of letting so many people suffer, as those seven million people did in the mid-40s. Perhaps the most recognized writer of the holocaust is Elie Wiesel. He was taken from his home and put into the concentration camps when he was still a young boy. Wiesel once said, "I write in order to understand as much as to be understood." He was liberated in 1945 and, once he was liberated "he imposed a ten-year vow of silence upon himself before trying to describe what had happened to him and over six million other Jews." In a lecture on the dimensions of the holocaust Wiesel said, ""The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration" is a contradiction in terms. As in everything else, Auschwitz negates all systems, destroys all doctrines...
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...On Friday 12, 2016, I went to the Museum of tolerance; this was my first time coming to this museum. When I first saw the outside building, the first thing that went to my mind was that this museum looks like a puzzle box; it is very different from other museum that I have been too. During my observation inside the museum, I saw people enjoying themselves while walking around, talking about each work-art, taking pictures, writing about things that they felt fascinating and I am pretty sure that they were having such a good time. It is very interesting watching so much effort and inspiration that artist put into this masterpieces. The artist that I really like the most was the famous writer of Anne Frank. Anne is well known because of her diary...
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... thoughts, feelings, emotions, fantasies, and dreams. I have chosen one book and a movie. In a book, it talks about James, who is a main character of the story. He was really confused about his identity because he was a black and his mother was a white. In a movies, they showed the racism and differences create between students in their childhood. Both of these based on true stories. I would compare these character with Marxism and Freud’s theory. A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother is the autobiography of James McBride. It is also a tribute to his mother. It starts of the narrator James’s mother Ruth, who describes her early life with her family. She was born in Polish Orthodox Jewish family that was immigrant to United States. She had a repressed childhood in Virginia. She was sexually abused as a child from her father. In critical theory today: a user friendly guide, Tyson defines Fear of abandonment—“the unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us (physical abandonment) or don’t really care about us (emotional abandonment)” (Tyson 16). Tyson also comment on this definition if fear of abandonment is my core issue, I am liable to develop fear of intimacy as a core issue as well. “When we look at the world through a psychoanalytic lens, we see that it is comprised of individual human beings, each with a...
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...As Elie spends more time at these camps him and every other prisoner completely loses their faith in God and humanity. Spending time in these camps took a toll on everybody, and had everyone reexamining their opinions and perspectives on the world. “My forehead was bath in cold sweat.But I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it....' Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us, today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematories....' His voice was choking.” (Night 30) Elie saw after what cruel acts humans are capable of is completely and thoroughly shocked, his father standing beside him supports him through Elie's awakening by giving him bitter words of guidance. With this Elie's faith starts destructing, as he sees how such vile deeds took place with absolutely no repercussions, and in the same way, his father also loses begins to lose faith and is shown through his tone of intense bitter, incensed words. “ 'Where is God? Where is He?' someone behind me asked... For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes..... Behind me I heard the same man...'Where is God now…'..... And I heard a voice within me answer ... Here he is-He is hanging here...
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...War is an event that can have various different outcomes. It impacts everyone in a different way, but these effects can be characterized as positive, negative, and neutral. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the reader witnesses the events that took place during the holocaust through the eyes of the author. Wiesel explains all of his experiences in great detail, painting a very vivid picture of the occurrences around him. Through reading this novel and reading the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech at the end, a main point becomes apparent. This idea can also be seen in the memoir In My Hands by Irene Gut Opdyke and Jennifer Armstrong, in the Universal Declaration of Human Right, and in Operation Pied Piper. The theme that is common in all...
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...humanizes oneʼs understanding of the Holocaust in unique and evocative ways. A unique feature of the text is clever fusion between personal accounts and documented history using mediums such as, interviews, official documents, poetry and song. This enhances the stories of the authorʼs parents, Yossl and Genia, whilst evocatively capturing the atrocities of the Holocaust. The relationship between history and memory is further explored in Kevin Ruddʼs “Sorry apology to Stolen Generations”. Bakerʼs “The Fiftieth Gate” suggests that memory humanises historical events, juxtaposed by the emotionless discourse of history in unique and evocative ways. Baker provides insight into the historical events associated with the Holocaust,emphasising number of deaths that occurred during the genocide. In Gate 26, Baker explores the deaths Geniaʼs parents witnessed in the lines, “Among 1380 people, one family survived by chance. They were Leo Krochmal and his wife Rosa who witnessed the shooting,” The impersonal tone and simple language in the lines underscores the straightforward and detached nature of history. In contrast, the recount of Genia hiding from Germans in Gate 6 is markedly more confrontative, “we could hear the footsteps, the shots, the screams”. The alliteration of “shots” and “screams” accentuates Geniaʼs fear and trepidation. The sensory imagery positions the reader as Genia, struggling to survive, humanizing the atrocities of the Holocaust. The inclusion of song, particularly...
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...Effects of the Holocaust on Survivors’ Hundreds of people die each day. Two-thirds of the Jewish population were killed, not a big deal, right? Six million people died in a matter of four years because of a one ERRONEOUS idea created by a horrendous man. That number is baffling. Not many people who believed in the Jewish faith made it out alive, anti-semitism, but the people who didn't die are being affected in many ways. The people who were involved in the Holocaust should have gotten a lot more help than they did at first. Anything would have helped them, even a loaf of bread. Many survivors continue to suffer from the effects of the Holocaust; the world should have done something to stop these horrible effects on people such as survivor's...
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...In Maus, Spiegelman attempts to tell his grandfather’s experience in the Holocaust in addition to displaying the current state of his relationship with his grandfather. Instead of simply portraying the characters as human, however, Spiegelman chose to represent each figure in the novel as a certain type of animal based on the character’s religion or nationality, creating an imitation of the Holocaust. While some might assume that this seemingly playful representation of an event as serious as the Holocaust is extremely disrespectful, Spiegelman explains in Metamaus, a book about Maus, that the “animal masks that allowed [him] to approach otherwise unsayable things. What makes Maus thorny is actually what allows it to be useful as a real ‘teaching tool’” (Spiegelman, Metamaus, 127). Rather than mocking the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s choice to depict the characters in his book as animals enabled him to delve deeper into the core of his grandfather’s story without offending anyone as well as making it appeal to a wider audience. Spiegelman adds to his reasoning behind the animal masks later in Metamaus: “Paradoxically, while the mice allowed for a distancing from the horrors described, they...
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...Wiesel’s Changes of Faith The Holocaust brought about many hardships and created severe adversity for its victims that may have created experiences ultimately too traumatic that transformed their lives for years to come, either through starvation and labor in the concentration camps or execution and incineration in the extermination camps. In the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, Wiesel tells the story of himself as a young Jewish boy born in Romania, who in 1944, was forced into ghettos with the rest of the Jewish citizens and later deported, along with his father, to the Nazi’s largest killing center, Auschwitz-Birkenau. While living through this day-to-day horrifying basis, Elie begins to live with overwhelming fear and total alienation, as well as his increasing loss of faith on God and whether God is even existent or not for His lack of participation in trying to help the Jews. Although Elie manages to survive his long and frightening journey through both labor and death camps, his faith was never at the high-most air-reaching level as it dramatically changed throughout the course of the novel because of his disturbing experiences in witnessing cremated human beings, executions, and the going through the loss of his entire family. Prior to being deported to the camps, Elie’s faith was extremely high as he was well-established with his studies in mysticism and the cabbala and his great involvement with religion through prayers. Elie is finding a great interest in wanting to...
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