Analysis Of 'Thirty-Seven Who Saw Murder Didn T Call The Police'

The Holocaust left a dark stain on humanity’s history. So much so that the phrase “Never again” has become synonymous with learning from the lessons of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is classified as genocide, which is the systematic killing or extermination of a group of people. Millions of people lost their lives in the Holocaust. Jews, Roma, Christians, Slavs, etc were all senselessly murdered in the name of cleansing the human race. Reverend Martin Neimoller, was a German Lutheran minister during the Holocaust. At first, he supported the Nazi Party but went on to denounce Adolf Hitler. He discusses this transformation in his poem, “First They Came,” where he illustrates how it is important for humanity to learn from the past and not be indifferent

Humanity will greatly suffer if it becomes ignorant of past lessons as it leads to an attitude of indifference, history repeating itself, and hinders societal progression. Indifference is inhumanity at its very core. One loses their humanity when one ignores the suffering of others without care in the world. Wiesel makes the powerful statement, “And in denying their humanity, we betray our own” (Wiesel). This quote demonstrates that being indifferent comes at the expense of the world’s humanity. Indifference leads to a lack of compassion, which furthers the suffering of others. To have compassion for others means to acknowledge others’ suffering and take action to help. Compassion is an innate human emotion; therefore, by having no compassion for others, one goes against the very thing that makes them human. Indifference allows the world’s suffering to continue at the expense of people’s humanity. Furthermore, indifference leads to being apathetic toward others. To be apathetic toward others means to have little to no concern or care for them and/or their

Furthermore, when humanity does not learn from the lessons of the past and progress, it gets stuck in a cycle of suffering. If society never progresses, the same problems continuously repeat themselves. The creation of these cycles is only possible if the root causes of them are never fully addressed or fixed. As previously quoted, Elie Wiesel makes references to some of these cycles in his speech, “These failures have cast a dark shadow over humanity: two World Wars, countless civil wars, the senseless chain of assassinations (Gandhi, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Sadat, Rabin), bloodbaths in Cambodia and Algeria, India and Pakistan, Ireland and Rwanda, Eritrea and Ethiopia” (Wiesel). The problems of assassination, genocide, and war have never been fully addressed, which continues to allow these atrocities to occur and reoccur, creating vicious cycles of violence. Once a cycle has been formed, it can be hard to break. People become comfortable with and indifferent to the existence of these cycles and the suffering they bring. Not learning to address these reoccurring issues, only furthers the suffering of