Elie Wiesels Night and Alicia Appleman-Jurmans Alicia :: Elie Wiesel Night Essays

ElieWiesel's Night and Alicia Appleman-Jurman's Alicia    Wars between groups of people over race, religion, and beliefs have been fought throughout human history. Millions of people have been killed simply because of what they look like, whom they worship, how they live, and what they believe in general. However, it was not until after Hitler's Holocaust that the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" - the systematic destruction of entire groups of people for petty and irrational reasons - came into use. Hitler's holocaust was different than all of the wars fought for cultural reasons that came before the Holocaust. The Nazis did not wish to simply subdue the Jews, oppress them, and try to force their beliefs upon them. Instead, Hitler and the Nazis wanted nothing less than the complete annihilation of the Jews, and everything related to Judaism. Hitler's campaign against the Jews was hardly a war. Rarely did the killers encounter large, armed and organized bodies of Jewish soldiers. Rather, the Nazis encountered largely defe nseless ordinary people: women, businessmen, farmers, and the elderly. Most vulnerable of all the victims were the children. On the weakest members of society, the Nazis showed perhaps the least mercy.    Children are always less suited for physical hardship than all but the frailest of adults. Children can not travel on foot long distances, go without food, or resist disease as well as adults. Clearly, this made them extremely vulnerable to the will of the Nazis during World War II. They could not endure the long death marches, starvation, and disease inflicted upon them by the Nazis as well as adults could. As a result, in a purely physical sense, the Holocaust must have been far more torturous to children than to adults.    Often, the Nazis specifically targeted children. Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, ElieWiesel was told to lie about his age by a Jew already imprisoned there. If he had given his real age, fifteen, he would have likely been immediately sent to the gas chambers. Instead, by saying he was eighteen, he was spared immediate death in order to be put to work (Wiesel 28). Shortly thereafter, Wiesel witnessed "a lorry ...at the pit and [delivering] it's load - little children.