Nazi Holocaust Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Nazi Holocaust - Essay Example The essay "Nazi Holocaust" will help to understand the graphic nature of the Holocaust, and the reader can picture the events in his mind based on the explanation given. The book Night recalls the occurrences in the town of Sighet, Transylvania in Northern Romania. At the very beginning, we get introduced to the twelve-year-old Eli back in 1941. The historic expulsion of all Jew from Sighet gets vividly explained in the book. The Hungarian police rounded up all foreign Jews and bundled them up into waiting vehicles in full public glare. Rumor mills purported that these Jews got taken to Galicia where they became happy and got formally employed. These reports later got challenged by an escapee, Moshe the Beadle, who told of the Gestapo and how the Jews got killed each day. He explained that the Jews got led to a forest where they got forced to dig trenches before they got shot and buried. Babies, he explained, got tossed in the air and used for target practice. Moshe had escaped after getting a shot at the leg and mistaken to be dead. The Jews ignored Moshe’s warning with some saying that he was mentally unstable (Wiesel 21). As soon as the Fascist took over control of the government, Nazi soldiers took to the streets of Sighet where they rounded up all Jews including Eli and his family. Elis family got put in a cattle wagon after receiving a stern warning that anyone who dared to escape would be killed. They got transported to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, men and women got separated. Eli and his father got whisked away separately, while Hilda, Elis mother and Tzipora got led straight to the gas chamber. Eli tried to remain vigilant the rest of the night in the concentration camp never losing sight of his father. He feared that if they got separated, that would be the last he would ever see of him (Wiesel 22). On their first night at Auschwitz, Eli and his father got put in line ready to be thrown into the fire furnace. They both watched trucks loading up children that were to be delivered into the fire (Wiesel 19). Elis father chanted the prayer for the dead, commonly known in Jewish circles as Kaddish. He m ade the prayer for them too in anticipation of the inevitable. They survived the night and got ordered back to their barracks. Sometimes the whole camp got forced to watch hangings of children. Eli graphically explains this when he says the child’s eyes were still clear, and his tongue was still pink (Wiesel 23). Eli and his father got moved to Auschwitz II form Birkenau in 1945. This was a work camp with reduced cases of violence. Eli explains that they were in constant search of food, saying that they were worse than corpses. After American and soviet bombing of the concentration camps, 60,000 Jews including Eli and his father got moved back to Germany in what gets commonly referred to as the death march. They got bundled up in trains to Auschwitz where many of them lost their lives due to congestion. They literally lay on top of others, occasionally throwing out dead bodies each morning. This train journey marked their symbolic journey to freedom as the Soviets liberated A uschwitz (Wiesel 65). Maus, on the other hand, gets divided between the present interviewing sessions where Spiegelman interviews his father and the past, where Vladek recounts his experiences between the mid 1930s and 1945, when the Holocaust ended. The book recount details of the marriage union between Vladek and his wife, Anja. Vladek got captured as a war prisoner due to escalating racist and political tensions. He got shocked to find out that Sosnowiec got placed under German siege when he got released. Vladek got released on the Polish Protectorate side of the