ipl-logo

Nature Of Evil In Schindler's List

948 Words4 Pages

The nature of evil is a central point within the texts Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, The Most Dangerous Game, by Richard Connell, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula Le Guin, and The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson. These four texts pose the question whether or not being passive in the face of an evil that one could do something against is as evil as the original act, or how it sizes up to the original act of evil. These four texts all have examples of passivity in the face of evil, such as the Allies in WWII ignoring the Holocaust, or The Village going along with the tradition of stoning people for good crops, along with several more. All four texts show us how humans can “stick their heads in the sand” just to avoid culpability in exchange for human beings’ quality of life.

In Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, the act of passivity against a preventable evil that spielberg portrays the Allies, and general populace, ignoring the fact that the Holocaust was happening. The symbolism of “the girl in …show more content…

The child is the price for having an apparent utopian society. They are left in a broom closet in their own excrement with a meager diet which makes them malnourished and small. Le Guin has done this to convince the audience about the price for happiness and luxury. The child in this text is similar to the Girl in Red in Schindler’s List in regards to how the pain and suffering they had gone through could’ve been stopped by a proactive party.However in this text, the ones who walk away from Omelas are the ones who have seen the child and walk from the city gates over the horizon of the world. These ones who walk away are still in part guilty of not helping the child, though at least they are not reaping the crops of a human being’s

Show More
Related
593 Words | 3 Pages

In contrast, “The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror” focuses on the history of mass death goes back as far as 500 years ago. Sartwell cited some historical events that happened, including the Cambodian Killing Field, Nazi Holocaust, Cultural Revolution, Belgians vs. Congolese and the African Slave Trade. In his article, Sartwell assumes that authority especially hierarchies is the most “evil” thing in our society. Sartwell also states that all humans are "evil” (Sartwell), but then ask if evil is something that is learned behavior through institutional means, for example through media and bureaucracy.

Read More
620 Words | 3 Pages

“A populace never rebels from passion but from impatience of suffering,” Edmund Burke. NEED help with A BRIDGE. Fahrenheit 451 illustrates that rebellion is healthy because it causes a faulty society to break down and ultimately rebuild in a better way. The Omelas the author suggests that a society needs a sacrifice to stay healthy and rebellion doesn’t necessarily affect change.

Read More
1029 Words | 5 Pages

Elie Wiesel, a male Holocaust survivor, once said: “The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference” and “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” During the Holocaust, over eleven million innocent people were killed because of the hate and intolerance the Nazis had for them. Many people fight against the injustice of the Nazi party and without them hundreds more people could have died. Intolerance and hate were some main causes of the Holocaust, and the fight against it is shown in The Book Thief, The Whispering Town, Paper Clips, and Eva’s Story.

Read More
1915 Words | 8 Pages

In the world today, there are good kind hearted people, and there are also individuals who have immoral ulterior motives. But, to truly gain an insightful view of the person is to regard their actions under extreme conditions and pressure. While Elie Wiesel suffers during the Holocaust in his memoir Night, he witnesses the actions—whether good or bad, of the people he meets, and their motives that were never forgotten, as displayed in the novel. Since the Holocaust was an extreme event that caused pressure to make the right decisions, and suffer by the hands of the Nazis, or to act with neglect to the victims and be ridden with guilt, it can be said many Holocaust victims suffered, and some of the bystanders noticed and took action. One such

Read More
1102 Words | 5 Pages

The Holocaust took place during the years 1933 to 1945. It was an attempt to remove all of the Jews, and other smaller groups such as homosexuals and Jehovah's Witnesses, which lived in the country of Germany. The events that took place during the holocaust were lead by a German man named Adolf Hitler. Schindler's List is a film about the Holocaust from a man named Oskar Schindler's perspective as a leader of a concentration camp. The film displays the five stages of the Holocaust.

Read More
868 Words | 4 Pages

Imagine knowing your fate ahead of time. That single moment would be stuck in your head, replayed every second to prevent it. This would obstruct your feeling of morals, making you only focus on your own survival. Nothing would get in your way of trying to survive. During the Holocaust, many people were faced with this moment when they stepped in a concentration camp.

Read More
1275 Words | 6 Pages

“ … The world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured, remained silent in the face of genocide.” - Elie Wiesel. The man behind that quote is one of the few people in the world to survive one of the worst tragedies in human history, The Holocaust. An event in which millions of people perished, all because of a crazed dictator’s dream. Elie Wiesel who amazingly survived the horrors, documented his experience in his book, Night.

Read More
913 Words | 4 Pages

The Holocaust was a terrible time in the world’s history. Not many Jewish people made it out of the Holocaust alive, but Elie Wiesel not only made it through the dark years, but he also wrote a book and delivered a speech. Both of these things were meant to tell the world about the horrors that happened in the concentration camps and raise awareness about the Holocaust. The book Night tells us what Elie’s journey throughout 1943-1945 (the time of the Holocaust) was like with Nazis controlling the Jews. In the speech Perils of Indifference, Elie explains why it is dangerous to not have an opinion on certain topics.

Read More
2053 Words | 9 Pages

He is very well known for his memoir “Night” and his speech “Perils of Indifference.” The message is much more prominent in his book “Night” rather than his speech. Real life examples are provided, it is more understandable, and it leaves you with something to think about. The length, connections, and abundant amount of description helps promote the message as well as the book tells us why we can never let such indifference as the Holocaust happen again.

Read More
609 Words | 3 Pages

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors. Wiesel’s speech is tightly organized and moves the ideas forward effectively. Wiesel begins with humility, stating that he does not have the right to speak for the dead, introducing the framework of his words.

Read More
1129 Words | 5 Pages

Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.

Read More
808 Words | 4 Pages

He writes, "this is the century that in has known two world wars, the totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia" (377). Without knowing anything about these evil times, it is evident that evil was present throughout the whole century, and such evilness cannot be justified. Levinas becomes more specific and talks about the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered for no reason. As explained by Emil Fackenheim, a Jewish philosopher, the Holocaust is the perfect event to explain that suffering cannot be justified, because unlike any other genocide, the Jews were killed only for the sake of being killed. In other genocides, repressions, and evil events, people were killed for a reason.

Read More
956 Words | 4 Pages

During the Holocaust, a great number of brave individuals wondered whether they should have reacted to the Nazi forces through passive or violent acts of resistance. Any form of resistance was vital for even the slightest possibility of survival for the jews. In “Resistance During the Holocaust”, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, and “Violins of Hope,” it gave real examples of Jewish people who chose to arm themselves and fight the Nazis head on or Jews who opted for passivity in order to hide their loved ones. Nevertheless, the main goal of these methods for resistance was to defy the enemy at hand that was the Nazi party. Therefore, people can best respond to conflict by active resistance in order to avoid late shame and humiliation, escape the

Read More
833 Words | 4 Pages

Alan Platon once said, “There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and this is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.” Over the course of history it is very easy to see that man’s own worst enemy is often man himself. This can be seen during the Crusades or during the reign of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany. In Night, Elie Wiesel shows how man can be so inhumane to his fellow man through his experience in the Holocaust. He also shows how one can step above this and not let inhumanity tear him apart.

Read More
1190 Words | 5 Pages

Mankind is both intelligent and capable of making humble choices, however, it is the following choices of the Nazis that prove that much of humanity is deeply flawed and cruel. For example, when Elie first gets to the concentration camp, he is still confused as to where he was and if all that was happening was a dream. The thought of his surroundings being a dream soon turned to reality when, “A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes… children thrown into the flames.”

Read More

More about Nature Of Evil In Schindler's List

Related Topics

Open Document