As we wrapped up our Holocaust unit and reading of Elie Wiesel's Night, I asked the students to respond to any one of the quotes that we have discussed in the unit, and explain what was so significant about that quote. I was ecstatic at all of the amazing responses the students were writing. I wish I could post each and every one of them on here. However, I have selected one response that, in my opinion, nailed the aspect of the assignment perfectly. This student truly wrapped her brain around the concepts in the text and used some high level thinking in her response. So, please enjoy the following excerpt from Jackie's reflection:
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“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”
-Elie Wiesel
Love is one thing, and hate is another, but Indifference, it is many things, and it takes many forms. It can be hard to distinguish, and even harder to get rid of. It creeps up, like your darkest nightmares, your deepest fears. It stalks you, ready to jump at the first chance it gets, and you let it. You let it overcome you, you let it take your soul and stain it black, let it fill you with fear and hate and hurt and guilt.
During the terrible time of the Holocaust many men weak of spirit and with not a sliver of hope allowed indifference to overcome them, and ended up losing themselves to it. Not just themselves, but their lives. They stopped believing that the end to their torture would come and that one day they would be liberated from their oppressors, the Germans. Letting themselves be lost to their indifference made them lose their love for one another, their dignity for themselves, and hope in this world. They did not hate each other, they were indifferent to one an other's death, their despair in the camps.
Son’s killed their fathers. For what? Food, yes food. A crust of bread, a stale bit of soup, anything that would fill their emaciated bodies, so they could last another minute, a second, a day. They did not hate their fathers, because how could you hate the man who made you? It just didn’t matter anymore. They were inhuman, losing everything but hunger, every trace of humanness, of themselves. As if every bit of their identity had been striped off, shaved off, washed away in one of the showers, they had become shells, empty of all but the most primitive human emotions and feelings. And yet, some still did not give in to Indifference.
Elie Wiesel was not one of them. He may not have hated his father, who would have given it all up to see his son live, but Elie was indifferent to his last wish, to his death even, He lay there, hearing his father’s last dying cries, letting the SS beat him to death, wanting to move, and yet not wanting to be hit, pretending to be indifferent. Indifference is a mask. Man wears it over his face, and man grows to fit it. Elie grew to fit the mask, and even thought for a second, Elie let his father die, not with hate, but with his indifference.
Elie, like many others succumbed to the deathly grip of indifference, and although it may not have killed him, it certainly ripped his father from this Earth, leaving Elie with nothing. The soldier’s indifference took his mother and sisters, and his own got rid of his father. Worse than any other death imaginable, Indifference killed so many of the Jews of Europe. Many can argue that it was Hitler, but in reality, it was Indifference that did away with them all. Indifference ruled the world at the time. No one cared to see or even know what was happening in the innermost parts of Hitler’s plans and actions. They all let one another fail and become evil, to let this indifference claw at them form the inside, a cruel deathly guilt that ripped at their insides and in the end, none other but it succeeded.
-J.R.
