Chattahoochee River
Monday, January 26, 2015
Chapter 4 - The Hangings
I would like to note how the Jew's sense of humanity has been chipped away to where they value a life more than another. (Perhaps I missed a key detail, or I am not understanding the story completely.) Elie describes the hanging of a youth who was caught stealing during the air raid. He comments how this death upset him more than others he witnessed, but at the same time others around him are more interested in getting their next meal then watching this fellow Jew die. He then skips to the most traumatic hanging he witnessed when an "angel-like" pipel is sentenced to death. All around Elie, people are weeping and crying out to God, asking why this is happening. I understand the pipel was very well liked among everyone, but when contrasting the two hangings - the first and the pipel - I notice a large difference in emotion of the Jews. I guess the background of the hangings make a difference - one was hanged for stealing and the other for refusing to reveal information about firearms- as well as the character of the people hanged - the pipel was well liked - but I would like to think witnessing the death of any Jew, not just the well-liked ones, would cause other Jews around to mourn and grieve and cry out to God.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That's a good point Loren. Any death should be just as bad as another, but if you look at the timeline one had happened much before. Maybe people were surrounded by so much death that it stopped impacting them. In the camps the Jews were surrounded by death. It's possible that maybe they were so focused on surviving they didn't have time to mourn everyone.
ReplyDeleteLoren, I agree with what you pointed out in this post. I think it kind of connects with the post Mikaela made, wherein she points out that after the first hanging, Elie said the soup was the best he had ever tasted, and then after the pipel was hung, the soup tasted of corpses. I wonder if this devastation caused by the hanging of the pipeline has to do with the fact that Elie considered the death of the pipel to be the "death of God" in a sense and if the others were mournin more only because of Elie's own perspective/not in reality.
ReplyDelete