Trenches

Night has become an unbelievably good book. The beginning didn’t catch me but as I read on it became better and better. This was one of the best books I have read in a long time. The insight that was provided through the authors personal expierence made this book so much better. Another thing that I thought was very good was the amount of detail that the author used when he even described his hunger. I could picture what he was talking about when he described the muddy tents and camps that they were forced to stay in and the faces of the always shrinking Jewish population of his camps. Overall, I’m glad I picked this book and it was definetly worth reading and opened my eyes on the Holocaust.

This book is really good so far. I was beginning to think that it was going to be boring but it has started to get very intense and emotional. The details and anecdotes the author gives about the Holocaust and the death he sees every day is horrible and I’ve begun to really look at what the lives of the people who were stuck in concentration camps were really like. They lived each day in fear of dying and had to do random mandatory things just to demoralize them. “The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive…” (Wiesel 62). This quote was just after three people had been hung inside of the concentration camp. The mental images and the magnitude of the words that the author uses left me amazed that such horrible things could have ever happened to other humans.

I chose thise book because the Holocaust was such a meaningful event that a memoir that was written as though they were there would be very meaningful and deep. Our discussion of Evil in class is also very relevant to this book because it is one of the main ideas associated with the word Evil. The development of the young man who is featured in this story throughout the terrible things that he has to witness should be very interesting because through such a dramatic time people were forced to do things that they did not thing were morally or socially correct which could make this story very interesting.

I agree with Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete because he has a very realistic perspective on the modern definition of evil. His view is much broader than many other authors because he sees evil from the persepective of a man who works in the church and a person who is much like the rest of America or even the world when he is not completely engrossed in religion. “To me, to distract one from this, to look for explanations, is obscene. It’s an offense against the reality of what happened-and offense against our humanity–to look for political explanations, economic explanations, diplomatic explanations…The people who did this, who planned it, who brought it about, I don’t know what their theology or their ideology is. I take them at their word; they died with the name of God on their lips. People say they were sincere; well, yes, they were… This is an act for them that was a seincere act, the worship of their God. I take them at their word. Does that make them any less evil?”.

Ali Writes-

“The Wikipedia dictionary defines evil as a word used to described acts, thoughts, and ideas which are thought to (either directly or causally) bring about affliction and death. When reading this definition only one act of evil came to my mind: Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Centers, just one day short of five years ago.”

I agree to this statement because September 11 is the immediate modern idea of evil and it is present in a lot of different blogs that have appeared so far. The impact of the attack was so powerful that it epitomizes evil in the eyes of many modern teens as well as people of all ages. The reason that many people find this to be such an evil act is that they can all relate to the pain that almost all of America felt through this attack. Something with such an impact on daily human life that killed so many at one time hasn’t occured on American soil for a long time besides the bombing in Oklahoma. This was a hard time for America to cope with and it strained the trust that poeple had with the Middle East and even people that are of Middle Eastern descent in America. America began to have to look over its shoulder with every turn as airport security tightened and trust in the social aspect of American life began to thin. Evil is a very powerful word and it is hard to actually do something that can literally be defined as evil because it takes an event or idea of such magnitude that a large group of people are mentally and physically hurt.

The dictionary defines evil as morally wrong or bad, immoral or wicked. This definition is clearly present in the modern day world in our society and in others. The attack on September 11, 2001 is a very harsh representation of evil and how large of an impact it can have on the world and to people themselves. By crashing the planes into the towers and killing thousands of American people it crushed us mentally and literally physically. It will go down as possibly one of the worst and wicked deeds ever done by humans to other humans. In history Evil has been present since the world began and it will continue to thrive because of people. It is a part of human behavior no matter how big or small the idea or action that is considered evil is. In history almost ever person in the world knows what Adolf Hitler did do the Jewish population of Europe and his terrible rule in which he killed millions of people because of his mindset. Personally, I view this act as pure evil because of what happened to innocent men, women and children that had no need to die. In literature evil can come out and be shown in many different ways than in actual life because it can take on fictional forms such as monsters, demons, and other things that have no boundaries in non-fictional writing or in the real world. In some ways the defintion of being morally wrong or bad, immoral or wicked isn’t enough. Evil is such a strong force and negative force that it doesn’t even have adjectives to describe it.

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