Friday, February 1, 2013
Caitlyn's 1st Reflection
Elie Wiesel's detailed account of his experience, even after all this time, shows many people today the horrors of the Holocaust and how people would let the abuse and terror happen. On the train ride to the concentration camp, Wiesel watched as one woman, Mrs. Schächter, went completely crazy on the ride. She claimed to see fire, and would scream about it. At one point, some people were fed up with the screaming, and they decided to beat her. Wiesel described the beating as "blows that could have been lethal" (Wiesel 26). The people that beat this poor old women were her former neighbors and friends, people she conversed with daily-now are some of the oppressors. Not as oppressive as the Hungarian police or the Germans were, but still oppressive nonetheless. Yet what was more horrifying than this abuse was going on, and no one tried to stop it or prevent it. Wiesel could be accused of this, as he watched many attacks. On one occasion, Wiesel watched his own father get beat after asking where the toilets were located. Wiesel questioned himself, asking "what had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent" (Wiesel 39). Wiesel, even though it has been a day, has changed from an innocent teenager to a hardened, emotionless man. This transformation definitely surprised me. I know that if I was put into that same situation, I would've spoken out against the violence. Maybe, in a sense, not speaking out saved Wiesel. If he spoke out he could have been beaten or killed. So, in reality, this horrible action actually saved his life. I myself could not have endured anything that Wiesel had went through. You have to give him credit, he's pretty tough. These events didn't bother him. Maybe they did, but it didn't show. It takes an incredible amount of strength to overcome the emotions he had, and he was able to overcome them. Wiesel is strong, physically and emotionally, and that most likely contributed to his survival.
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When Wiesel witnessed his father getting slapped in the face, he didn't even blink. As Caitlyn said, this shows that the few long hours he had spent in the camp so far, he transformed him into almost a monster who had no emotion towards his father being hit. This transformation brings to my mind the transformation that the boys on the island in LOTF had went through. As the boys on the island had been transformed to savage boys who had killed with no remorse the people in the camps were transformed into people who took the sight of death as just a common everyday thing. This shows that exposure to even brief inhumane acts can transform young innocent children into savages. Along with the relation to LOTF through the transformation of the boys, I also see a relation between how the women on the train is screaming that she sees a fire and how the boys in the tribe chanted when they killed a pig. I saw this relation, because as Simon believed that the boys were going insane, so did all the people on the train around the lady. These two relationships help to prove a universal truth about how humans are hardened and changed by the experiences they endure throughout life.
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