“The camp songs were of a special type, a mixture of melancholy, sick humor, and vulgar words, a weird amalgam of Russian, Polish, and German” (12). The Jews not only lost a lot physically, but were also drained of many of their mental freedoms. They had to sing immoral, twisted songs, against their will, in languages that were not their own. It sheds new light on my old ideas about the Holocaust. We always learn about physical hardships, tortures, and atrocities. But the guards control the prisoners down to what they said and how they said it. Later on in the book, Wiesenthal talks more about the singing, and includes that the askaris forced the prisoners to “radiate contentment” as they sang (60). The prisoners were treated like animals, sucked to skeletal size, beaten, tortured, killed in the end, and they were expected to act content? How much can you take away from someone without driving them completely insane? Simon came out of the Holocaust alive, but how could he ever get past what he went through? It becomes a wonder that anyone could come out of a tragedy like that and rebuild afterward. I guess that shows that though the Jews were beaten down to their lowest, they became tough and resilient, allowing them to rise from the terror around them and move on. Could we have the courage to do so if it were us?
I like how you illustrated what happened to the Jews and everything that was taken from them. The German's not only took their possessions but their humanity.
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