Symbolic Moments during The Holocausts

RECOGNIZE SOMEONE?

A German policeman supervises the hanging of two men in Olkusz.

Rabbi Morris Dembowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1915. His family had originally come from the Bialystok region of Poland. Morris Dembowitz attended Yeshiva University and then received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He married Leonore Markson in 1942. He served as a chaplain during World War II and was stationed first in Rouen, then in the children's home Ecouis where he worked with child survivors of Buchenwald and eventually in the Heidenheim displaced persons camp. Among his activities was the overseeing of the exhumation and reburial of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. He later served as the Executive Director of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia. Rabbi Dembowitz passed away in 2006. 

pg.64-65 “The SS seemed more preoccupied…..That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”

This picture shows the tragic hanging of two men and gives more depth into the situation of the Holocaust. Concentration camps would kill thousands and thousands of people and the prisoners who survived would live a horrific life. Often the death penalty would come into play if you were to disobey the Germans. A scene from the book Night by Elie Wiesel shows what it is like to experience the hanging right in front of your own eyes. When the narrator says, “He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in the shadow of the gallows” (Wiesel, 64). The way he explains how the young boy is acting by using imagery makes the scene much more intense. The “shadow of the gallows” makes the mood of the scene seem darker which symbolizes death is to come soon. The picture of the men being hung is black and white, but you get the feeling that the mood is dark and depressing. Both connect in this way and they both should be sad because it represents the brutal death of innocent people.

Another moment in the passage where it can connect to the photo is when all the inmates are watching with such disgrace and sorrow. One of the inmates says, “Where is merciful God, where is he?” (Wiesel, 64). This moment shows how all the prisoners are questioning their faith by thinking this, how can God be real and let this cruelty happen? The narrator gets the author thinking this themselfs and creates the idea behind this scene. He uses such gruesome details such as, “His tongue was red, his eyes not yet extinguishing” (Wiesel, 65) to let his readers to know how he felt at that time and how cruel people can actually be when they controlled by a powerful source. This relates to the photo because when you look at the two men hung, you cannot help but feel disgusted that humans did this to the poor people. The passage and the photo both get the audience to realize how awful the Holocausts was. People started to lose their faith and the Germans let this happen.