Holocaust Essay, Research Paper

In this paper I will be going over the ethical views of the Holocaust. I have taken information from the accounts of surviving Jews of the Holocaust. I have also looked at information from those who believe the Holocaust was not a big deal and deny that many of the events even happened. I will bring up some viewpoints that may change people’s perception of the Holocaust. Some of these facts were a shock to me and changed my view a little but some are so profound they make you think twice. The biggest impact from all my research was the real life accounts of those who survived through it. Many of this information are hard to read, but I felt that is was a subject that I would like to learn more about. Doing this paper enlightened me and brought to attention many things to my attention. My hope with this paper is to do the same for those who read it. I want the reader to question what happened and draw a conclusion as to what they feel. I know my feelings on the holocaust and I will express my feelings on it through out the paper.

There were many people to survive the holocaust. Many of these people have chosen to tell their story of what happened. Many of these wrote their experience in book form. One of these people lives in the State of Maine now. Her name is Judith Magyar Isaacson. She wrote a book titled Seed of Sarah. This book is the memoirs of her experience as Jew during the holocaust. She starts her book off talking about her life before the reign of Hitler. She talks about her mother and her father and offers some photos of them in the book.

She talks of the appearance that a Jew had and how she admired her father’s straight nose. She dreaded getting her mothers nose because it becomes bent halfway down the bridge. She dreaded this not because it was ugly but because it was not the Aryan look. Hitler had declared that the perfect human being was an Aryan. The look composed a very proportional face. They had very exact measurement techniques to determine this. The person had to have blond hair and blue eyes. This was the look that every German citizen was supposed to strive for. For the Jewish community this was impossible. The Jews have a very large nose in proportion to the rest of their face. And their complexion was very dark, with dark hair and dark eyes. The Nazi’s was the political party that Hitler ran. They were all encouraged looking like this and were also encouraged to keep a fit well-groomed appearance. From seeing the photos of her father you see that her father did not follow this example of the perfect male at all.

In the book she describes the stripping of the soul and your personal being. They lived in Hungary before the holocaust. The Hungarian government gave up there Jewish people very quickly. They did not defend their people at all. They decide that it was easier to give Hitler their Jews instead of fighting them off. This takes away a little bit of your soul also. I can not even imagine my country giving me up and letting a leader form a different country take me away to kill me. This would be a very hard concept to deal with. You can not count on anything to save you if your own country will not even help you.

Ounce they were all rounded up like cattle they were put into ghettos where they lived until being sent to the concentration camps. When they went in to the ghettos they were searched and stripped of all their valuables. The German soldiers would search their packs and take whatever they pleased. And female S.S. officers searched the women’s privates searching for valuables that may have hidden. They were mainly searching for gold. Once in the ghettos many people were killed there. Or often they would commit suicide. In the case of the memoirs her father committed suicide.

The real stripping of who they were did not come until they were put into the concentration camps. They were forced to remove all of their clothing and put it in a corner of the room. They were ordered to go into the showers to sanitize. After the showers they shaved of all hair on their body. Once out of the building they were given an issued set of clothing. They then had a large red cross painted on their backs.

During the days they used to do head counts of the women. They were forced to stand up for up to five hours. In the scorching sun with out water and food this was a very daunting task. When the women would pass out and drop the S.S. men would take them away most likely to be terminated. They were forced to use a communal opened latrine and they had nothing for their menstrual cycle. This was all very degrading to the individual, and brought down the human spirit. They came from a form of society where all of this stuff was very personal and private. But their being was broken down enough so that this sort of thing did not bother them any more.

Many holocaust accounts say that the Jews were killed in masses. There is also the number that six million Jews were killed during the holocaust. There is a new group of people called the revisionist. These people are historians who are studying the holocaust and trying to find out what happened. They are said to deny the holocaust. They do not deny it; they are just revising by looking at the facts. They have now moved the number of Jewish deaths from the holocaust to around 1-2 million. Their reasoning is this. The 6 million figures included the death of every European Jew in the war regardless on how they died. The number included even the death of civilians from allied bombing.

The Death camp Auschwitz is now a museum. The number of 4 million people being executed there has now been officially moved to 1 million after further review. If this number is wrong they believe that the entire number can be wrong all together. This is a pretty widely excepted viewpoint. There are the people that still believe that the original number is true. There is also the denial that gas chambers were used at all. They believe in that the final solution was the exportation of the Jews and not the extermination. The documents found stated that the plan was to move the Jews into the Ghettos and then the camps and then they are moved into soviet Asia. The plan was followed through to an extent. 150,000 Jews were transported into the Soviet Asia. They were later allowed to come back.

So they believe that the Jews died of disease, exhaustion, and starvation. According to this view point Jew died of natural causes and not because the Nazis were exterminating them. Then people ask why did they starve them and not give them water? Well the explanation is simple. When the war was going on the allies cut off supply to Germany trying to create a war of attrition. Well since Germany was low on its supplies it gave its remaining supplies to its soldiers. So when the British soldiers found the camps of course there were mass graves and starving people. There were no supplies to feed them.

Another fact is that during the war no one recognized that there were death camps set up by the Nazis. It was even stated in both Eisenhower’s and Churchill’s memoirs left out the camps. This is yet more proof that the death camps did not happen.

Now this viewpoint enrages some people to the point of physical violence. But it is a respected view and a view that everyone should know to get a grasp on what really happened.

The holocaust is emotionally easier fir the people who believe this. They just account the deaths as war tragedies. They don’t have to believe that people were killed for no good reason except that they were not liked. I myself somewhat believe this explanation. This is a very good explanation for what happened and seems to follow everything in perfect order. But is still hard to discount the atrocities and what happened to the Jews.

Many Jews have survived the holocaust and told different accounts. But people often make a situation seem worse so they can justify what happened. The Jews wanted to make sure that they did not die a simple death. So the events of the holocaust may have been a little exaggerated. This often happens when there are mass amounts of trauma put on a person. They can often distort events and make them seem different. Much like a UFO account. Some times a person has a hard time explaining what happened so they make up details of a hard experience. Yes the events of the holocaust were tragic but death happens in war. 20 million Chinese died in the Second World War, but not many people know that. The human spirit will feel what it wants to feel. And we often take a specific event to explain what happened. We need the holocaust to show our spirit that what we were doing was right. We had to join the war and kill millions because it saved a race of people.

But to really understand what these people went through we would have to go through it ourselves. That experience would probably be too hard for any of us to live through. It takes the strong spirit and will to get through that.

Adolph Hitler believed that he was doing the right thing by imprisoning the Jews and either killing them or deporting them. He believed that what they were the reason that Germany had fallen into emotional and economical despair. He felt that the only way he could make the country more powerful was to get rid of them. Hitler thought that he was right and what he was doing was ethically right. Because it was for the good of the whole he had to do it.

Judith Magyar Isaacson felt she was doing a good thing by telling her story. She reached many people with her story by publishing a book. She felt as though people need to know what happened to her. She thought it was a horrible thing and everyone should know what went on so they can experience what happened in her life. If you read her story you will feel sick after you get done. You can not believe that anyone went through that experience. No human should have had to go through with that.

The revisionist feels as though it is their ethical duty to tell the world the truth about the holocaust. They think that if history is going to be documented it should be documented properly. You yourself would not want to be misrepresented. Especially if they were blaming you on the magnitude that its at. We also do not want to teach the wrong thing. We can not go misguided in our society just because it is wrong to believe something different.

No one-view point is right and no one ethical view is proper. We all have to take an ethical view on life. It is how we mold ourselves and become who we are. Our beliefs will always belong to us. Regardless what you believe in the holocaust you are never wrong. Ethics I believe are what you make of them. If your Ethics do not follow the norm that is ok. But you have to be willing to take the consequences of your actions if you follow your ethical views.