The Jews of Sighet. Romanian nationals that became Hungarian subjects after the Second Vienna Award in 1940. The world will remember their suffering from the Holocaust (Shoah) through Mr. Elie Wiesel's graphic personal account but how does their suffering compare to the other 8,000,000 Jews in Europe. At first you can say the Jews of Sighet suffer less than the other Jews as they started to feel repression and persecution from the Axis Powers in 1944 which by that point around 90% of Jewish population from Poland and Germany was exterminated. This is 3 years after most Jews in Axis-held land suffer from the effects of the genocide but this late response was not their salvation as the Axis in 1944 where desperate and low in resources as the Allies started to bring the war to the Axis’s home fronts. This desperation lead to the Jews of Sighet to face the worst of Axis persecution as they where ship in cramp train containers with little food to Auschwitz to work the fit men to death and execute the women, elderly, children, & weak in a furnace/gas chamber. So in the end the Jews of Sighet faced worst than their fellow Jews.
It is interesting how they really did not hear too much about what was going on with the war and also how when they did hear news, they didn't really believe it. It is challenging for us (in the year 2015) to think about how life was in 1944 -- people seemed more trusting overall. They weren't too skeptical about the Nazis, even when they invaded their town and stayed in their homes; the speaker mentions several nice things they did for the Jews they stayed with. I wonder if it was even that much more of a sense of betrayal for the Jews when they realized what was actually happening to them. The speaker (and the town of Sighet) really wanted to see the good in their oppressors, but in the end, as Wiesel says, their illusions were shattered.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was interesting, even a bit odd, that the Hungarian Jews knew absolutely nothing about the incurring calamity. At the same time, they didn't have the modern technology which we have.
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