Lynna Xu David Hyde Humanities II 11 March 2024 Loss of Faith - Humanities Memorial Paper Ein Volk, ein Reich, an Führer. The Holocaust not only caused over 6 million deaths from starvation and gassing, but also resulted in families being separated, Jews migrating, and being forced to wear the yellow star of David. Jewish people were sent to concentration camps and were tortured, killed, and burned to death alongside hundreds of thousands of others. The motive behind this mass murder is linked to Nazi ideology, which suggests that there is no equality between people, but only a racial hierarchy: the strongest race would survive and the weaker ones would perish. Hitler decided that Germans would be the master race, and in Hitler’s eyes, Jewish …show more content…
As all the prisoners gathered together to watch the hanging, many prisoners were weeping and praying to God to be released from this torture. “‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.’” (Wiesel, 65). Eliezer raises questions about the cruelty that the Nazis placed on them and why God is silent, refusing to help. He blames God for causing thousands of children to burn in the crematorium, for creating the concentration camps that make them suffer from day to night, and for the endless torture. Before the war, questioning God was unimaginable; it was part of him, his identity. But after watching the hanging of the pipel, Eliezer’s faith in God had completely vanished, to him, God was dead. This shows how the cruelty of the camps can completely change someone’s beliefs and values. This turning point in Eliezer’s faith in God is represented in the cracked hands of the clay model. These hands represent both how the Nazis ripped apart the Jews' faith in God, and also the Jews' despair. They were unable to preserve their faith as represented by the broken star of David. The cracks in the hands symbolize how the