Night connections
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and many of the other members of the concentration camps struggled with finding a way to remember the dead. In today's times there are cities suing the government to move holocaust plaques or get rid of them, more specifically today the residents of Amsterdam are suing to get some of the plaques moved because they don't want a daily reminder of the horrors that happened. Both Night and the non-fiction text show the struggle that people are going through to remember the countless people that were murdered in the Holocaust.
In Jewish tradition and culture there is an extensive ritual for mourning the dead and one of the rules is every person that died no matter their age gets a gravestone. During the Holocaust, jews were murdered in the thousands and none of them got the proper burial or gravestone and it was hard for them to be remembered while everyone was fighting for their lives. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (Wiesel)
The survivors of the holocaust had to remember the dead and bear the weight of witnessing everything that happened.
The non- fiction article talks about how the citizens of Amsterdam are suing the city because the plaques are bringing too much attention to their quiet neighborhoods and seeing them every day is too emotional. “In their motion, the two residents said they found it too confrontational to have to constantly be reminded, because of the memorial cobblestone, of the deportation and murder of Elte, a 51-year-old accountant who died at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. They also argued it “compromises the atmosphere” of their upscale neighborhood and their privacy and that of their children because it attracts onlookers”. (JPost) People nowadays want to remember but find it hard to compromise their daily lives for an event that was so tragic and sad.
The novel and the non-fiction article are related because during the Holocaust and during modern times each generation has their own struggles that revolve around remembering those who died during the Holocaust.
In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and many of the other members of the concentration camps struggled with finding a way to remember the dead. In today's times there are cities suing the government to move holocaust plaques or get rid of them, more specifically today the residents of Amsterdam are suing to get some of the plaques moved because they don't want a daily reminder of the horrors that happened. Both Night and the non-fiction text show the struggle that people are going through to remember the countless people that were murdered in the Holocaust.
In Jewish tradition and culture there is an extensive ritual for mourning the dead and one of the rules is every person that died no matter their age gets a gravestone. During the Holocaust, jews were murdered in the thousands and none of them got the proper burial or gravestone and it was hard for them to be remembered while everyone was fighting for their lives. “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time” (Wiesel)
The survivors of the holocaust had to remember the dead and bear the weight of witnessing everything that happened.
The non- fiction article talks about how the citizens of Amsterdam are suing the city because the plaques are bringing too much attention to their quiet neighborhoods and seeing them every day is too emotional. “In their motion, the two residents said they found it too confrontational to have to constantly be reminded, because of the memorial cobblestone, of the deportation and murder of Elte, a 51-year-old accountant who died at a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. They also argued it “compromises the atmosphere” of their upscale neighborhood and their privacy and that of their children because it attracts onlookers”. (JPost) People nowadays want to remember but find it hard to compromise their daily lives for an event that was so tragic and sad.
The novel and the non-fiction article are related because during the Holocaust and during modern times each generation has their own struggles that revolve around remembering those who died during the Holocaust.
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