“Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That's all we thought about. No thought on revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.” (pg. 115 Elie Wiesel)
This quote tells on even after they were freed, they were still in survival mode. I bet it would be very hard to to break this habit of trying to stay alive. I can also see that maybe because they were starving that they would only think of bread first too. And I also think they should have gotten the bread they ate. I find it is very difficult to try to picture them, running and eating. And even so small and skinny. From one soldier’s story, he said that there were a few people alive that resembled skeletons. That is just really hard to imagine, people like you and me looking like skeletons. Can you imagine yourself or someone you know looking like that? It is hard, and I can’t. I don’t know how people could survive being like that. So they should have and did eat all the bread they found.
This reminds me of the themes hope and victims. These people were victims of such a terrible genocide and the only way they survived was with hope. These people at the end of the Holocaust didn’t know what to do next, they couldn’t even think of what might happen next. It reminds me of shell shock kind of. Shell shock is when during war, the people who are fighting, can go through a traumatizing experience can kinda make them go insane in a way. It messes with their physiological being. And that is kinda in a way, happened to these people, accept they eventually could recover from it. And the survivors traumatizing experiences could have been the malnourishment, all the deaths they had seen, how people changed, or any other bad and terrifying things.
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I agree with your insight. Did you know that some of the survivors actually died because they ate too much after being freed? Terribly ironic.
ReplyDeleteBob Spielman
Yes I did know that. Their stomachs were too small because of how little they had been eating and did not let their stomachs adjust to how much food they were eating then.
DeleteAlthough I know that this happened, I find it very unrealistic, but only because everyone today is well fed, and not many people do things like that. I'm sure that if some people were put into concentration camps today, they would act almost exactly the same, but may be worse because many people today seem to be extremely self entitled.
DeleteAlthough I know that this happened, it seems very unrealistic as many people today are well fed. I'm sure that if people today were to be put into concentration camps, the would act the same, and if not worse. They may act worse as many people today seem to be self entitled, and care less about others than the survivors of the Holocaust.
DeleteI believe that some of the people in concentration camps had larger problems than people who experienced Shell Shock, as many of them came closer to death than victims of Shell Shock, and sometimes even had to watch as their family members died, while knowing that there was nothing that they could do to help them.
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