Many people today wonder why the Jewish people and others who were taken to concentration camps during the Holocaust did not revolt or fight the Nazis. The truth is that some did (look up Warsaw, for example), but most people just could not fathom what was happening. In Nightby Elie Wiesel, we see this up close. Moshe the Beadle is taken away and nearly killed but is able to make his way back to...
Many people today wonder why the Jewish people and others who were taken to concentration camps during the Holocaust did not revolt or fight the Nazis. The truth is that some did (look up Warsaw, for example), but most people just could not fathom what was happening. In Night by Elie Wiesel, we see this up close. Moshe the Beadle is taken away and nearly killed but is able to make his way back to Elie's town of Sighet. When he warns the other people there about what is happening, nobody believes him. Such horrors just could not register with the people. In Germany, when Hitler first came to power, he made all of the Jews register with the government. They did it because their government told them to do it, and they had no reason to believe their registration would be used against them. The events of the Holocaust were unprecedented. Another reason had to do with the Jewish faith. The Jewish people believed God would protect them. Some Jews kept that faith throughout the horrors they endured, while others, like Elie Wiesel, completely gave up on God.
"Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many factories of death?" (Wiesel 64)
Elie, like so many others, wished he had done something differently--wished his father had done something differently, but they just did not know what was coming.
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