Examples Of Silence And Differences During The Holocaust

Silence and Indifference during the Holocaust

Silence and indifference are both extremely harmful when people are being oppressed or persecuted. An extreme example of this is the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, those who disagreed with the actions of the Nazis were silent because they did not speak out, and some people were indifferent because they just did not have an opinion on the situation. Silence encourages the tormentor because it leads them to believe that nobody is opposed to their actions and they could do anything and nobody will speak out. Indifference is the most insidious danger of all because it appears to be harmless, but it encourages the tormentor in the same way as silence. The majority benefits when people are not silent

Examples of this are shown in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the article “A Secret Life” by Thomas Harding, and the film Paper Clips.

Harmful forms of both silence and indifference during the Holocaust are shown in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. Indifference is shown in the beginning of the book, when the foreign Jews are deported from Elie’s town. The people of the town do not pay much attention to the deportation, and Elie says that, “The deportees were quickly forgotten” (Wiesel 6). The fact that the people of the town forget about the foreign Jews so quickly shows their indifference towards the situation. They do not care because it does not directly affect them, but their indifference is only good for the Nazis. The fact that they do not pay attention to the deportation means that they are less likely to predict that they will be deported next, and the Nazis have the element of surprise. Silence is shown when the people of the town who are not Jewish just watch the Jewish people of their town get marched through town and into the smaller ghetto. Elie says that, “From their windows, from behind their shutters, our fellow

Their mother stays silent throughout the whole experience, even to their children, and it only harms people. The children grew up thinking that having prisoners as servants was a perfectly normal thing because their mother does not tell them otherwise. Harding even says that, “Once the Hoss children dressed up as prisoners, pinning black triangles and yellow stars to their shirts, then chased each other” (Harding 15). The fact that the children used the outfits of the Jewish prisoners to play a game shows that they did not truly understand what their father was doing because it was not explained to them. Both the children and the prisoners suffer from this because the children cannot form their own opinions on the situation and possibly take action against their father. The husband of one of the Hoss children says that, “She was as much a victim as anybody else. She was just a child when this happened” (Harding 15). The Hoss children were all young when their father was a Nazi, and they were not given the full story. One of the children says that she always thought that her father was an excellent person, and he gave no indication of being capable of the horrible crimes he committed. Even after the war, their mother stayed silent about their father’s crimes, and would not tell the British army where he was. One of the Hoss