“No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them” (Wiesel). The atrocities of the Holocaust were horrible and grotesque, and even today people continue to wonder with pessimistic awe what the persecuted people of the Holocaust era had to endure. We all try and “put ourselves in survivors’ shoes” as a way of showing sympathy and kindness, but in reality, we can’t do that. What many survivors had to endure is much beyond our grasp and even our most wild nightmares. It is magnified when you realize that many people who committed these crimes were not even true Nazis but rather common citizens who were, not necessarily, blindly following their government. Hitler was one of the sole people driving the country, he and other Nazis were the “racists” as Elie Wiesel put it while the rest of the country was the “collective judgment”. When Nazis gained power and staged a coup d’état against the …show more content…
When he was a child he moved to the city of Radom, an Industrialist city. When he grew up he got a job as a painter. Herschel was then drafted into the Polish Cavalry when Germany threatened to attack Poland. After Germany occupied Poland he was able to avoid capture as a POW and fled to Soviet-occupied Poland in Slonim. Herschel was able to find work as a painter in the country, but in 1941 he fell from some scaffolding and broke his leg. He went to the hospital. Three days later the German Army rushed Slonim and captured the city. Herschel lay helpless in the hospital, as German troops stormed it and killed all the patients inside. He was twenty-five years old when he died. Herschel was an innocent and honest young man, he died at the hands of German soldiers just because he was the disabled, Jewish, and former soldier. What many of these Russian POWs had to endure was almost similar to Herschel’s pain and suffering, and their end just as