Holocaust blog #2

This second blog for the Holocaust is about connections between artifacts that were in the presentations that we did and either the book Maus or the book Night. The artifact that I am going to look at is one from the Survivors presentation. The artifact is about the life before and during the Holocaust of Eva Galler, a Polish Jew born around 1925. Her story involved escaping from a cattle car that was bringing her to a concentration camp, and subsequent survival of the Holocaust by pretending she was a Catholic whose family had resettled and did not know where she is. Eventually, the Holocaust ended and she was able to go to the US.


"They took us to a cattle train. People started to run away from the train, but they were shot. Once on the train we had to stand because there was no room to sit down. A boy tore the barbed wires from the train window. The young people started to jump out of the window. Many jumped. The SS on the rooftop of the train shot at them with rifles. My father told us, the oldest three, "Run, run--maybe you will stay alive. We will stay here with the small children because even if they get out, they will not be able to survive." To me he said, "You run, I know you will stay alive. You have the Belzer Rebbe's blessing." He was very religious and he believed this. My brother Berele jumped out, then my sister Hannah, and then I jumped out. The SS men shot at us. I landed in a snowbank. The bullets did not hit me. When I did not hear anything anymore, I went back to find my brother and my sister. I found them dead. My brother Berele was 15. My sister Hannah was 16. I was 17." 



 This quote shows the horrors that the Holocaust had, with the main horror, and the focus of my blog, being the children that were killed unnecessarily during it. In this quote, the survivors sister and brother were killed at the age of 15 and 16, while their younger siblings just continued on their way to imminent death at the concentration camps. This willingness to kill children is a common theme throughout the Holocaust and is also shown in the book Night. In the book Night, Elie Wiesel and his father also see children being killed by the Nazis. Since the little kids could not work, there was no use for them in the camps and it was easiest to just kill them and spare the hassle of feeding them or taking car of them. 

"Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes... children thrown into the flames." 

This quote from Elie Wiesel's book, Night, about him seeing the babies thrown into the fire, shows that the killing of children was a common theme in the Holocaust and was widespread  since both him and the person from the artifact used saw the unnecessary killing of children in their Holocaust experiences. These connections also show the similarities that all of the Holocaust survivors had, having been through an extremely traumatic experience where they witnessed things that no human should even have to see or go through.