Holocaust Lost Hope
Carly Underkoffler
Dr. Brendon Corcoran
English 338-401
April 19, 2011
The Holocaust: Death by Lost Hope
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all." - Martin Luther King
The Holocaust was a horrific genocide in which the Nazi party systematically exterminated millions of Jews, homosexuals, mentally retarded persons, and others, on the pretense of ‘purifying’ the German race. The Nazis put a great deal of thought and consideration into the creation of concentration camps to create demeaning and lethal places of extreme desperation. No other genocide has been nearly as creative in the methods it used to torture and exterminate …show more content…
Levi writes, “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (Levi 120). In the end Levi only needed a small glimmer of hope to carry on, something that the Nazis had attempted to extinguish since his arrival to the camp. Levi expresses how efficient the Nazi’s were at breaking down the mentality of prisoners and how persistently they worked deprive the prisoners of any hope of survival. Levi found that food and water became only a couple of basic necessities for the prisoners and that hope was just as an essential part of his survival. In order to survive the camps, the prisoners needed hope; to hope, they needed only the smallest glimpse of a possibility to return to normal life after the camp. With no hope there is little survival, with no survival there is only
Dr. Brendon Corcoran
English 338-401
April 19, 2011
The Holocaust: Death by Lost Hope
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all." - Martin Luther King
The Holocaust was a horrific genocide in which the Nazi party systematically exterminated millions of Jews, homosexuals, mentally retarded persons, and others, on the pretense of ‘purifying’ the German race. The Nazis put a great deal of thought and consideration into the creation of concentration camps to create demeaning and lethal places of extreme desperation. No other genocide has been nearly as creative in the methods it used to torture and exterminate …show more content…
Levi writes, “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (Levi 120). In the end Levi only needed a small glimmer of hope to carry on, something that the Nazis had attempted to extinguish since his arrival to the camp. Levi expresses how efficient the Nazi’s were at breaking down the mentality of prisoners and how persistently they worked deprive the prisoners of any hope of survival. Levi found that food and water became only a couple of basic necessities for the prisoners and that hope was just as an essential part of his survival. In order to survive the camps, the prisoners needed hope; to hope, they needed only the smallest glimpse of a possibility to return to normal life after the camp. With no hope there is little survival, with no survival there is only