Group Reader LC #2

1. Critical Stance
     a. Dehumanization is when a person isn't treated as though he or she isn't a human or depriving them of their qualities, personality, or spirit.

     b. Before the prisoners went to these camps, most were very spiritual and joyful. They all looked on the bright side of things and said it was all part of God's plan. As they spent time in these camps, they lost all sense of that to a point where some didn't worship God anymore. For example, Abika Drumer. He was once very spiritual but once we was one of the selected ones, he lost all his morale that he had. Once they went through the change of not believing, they became gloomy and lost all faith in everything.

     c. Eliezer goes through a lot while in these camps. He starts to have this sort of numbness to these horrible situations. For example at the hangings, he just looks and keeps going. He feels bad for them but he has to focus on himself to survive. As he spends more time and experience more things, he starts to lose faith in God. He believes that he shouldn't have to pray to God because he is responsible for the hangings, the crematories, and all these camps.

2. Dialectical Journal

Page 52: "I had watched the whole scene without moving. I kept quiet. In fact I was thinking how to get farther away so that I would not be hit myself. What is more, any angerI felt at that moment was directed, not against that Kapo, but against my father. I was angry at him, for not knowing how to avoid Idek's outbreak. That is what concentration camp life had made me."

Page 57: " We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afraid of death; at any rate not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life."

Page 62: "Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?""

Page 64: "Why, but why should I bless Him? In every fiber I rebelled. Because He had had thousands of children burned in His pits? Because He kept six crematories working night and day, on Sundays and feast days? Because in His great might He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna and so many factories of death? How could I say to Him: "Bless art Thou, Eternal, Master of the Universe, Who chose us from among the races to be tortures day and night, to see our fathers, mothers, our brothers, end in the crematory? Praised by Thy Holy Nmae, Thou Who hast chose us to be butchered on Thine altar?""

Page 65: "I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone-teribly alone in a world without God and without man. Without love or mercy to be stronger than the Almighty, to whom my life had been tied for so long. I stood amid that praying congreation, observing it like a stranger."

Page 72-73: He was not the only one to lose faith during those selection days. I knew a rabbi from a little town in Poland, a bent old man, whose lips were always trembling. He used to pray all the time, in the block, in the yard, in the ranks. He would recite whole pages of the Talmund from memory, argue with himself, ask himself questions and answer himself. And one day he said to me: "It's the end. God is no longer with us.""