Chattahoochee River
Thursday, January 15, 2015
The Train Ride
The train ride from Sighet to Auschwitz, the focus of the second chapter, demonstrates how the Nazi Germans where able to easily dehumanize other humans. In the ride, the Germans packed 80 Jews into each train car like if they where livestock being ship to a slaughterhouse. You can see that they don't think Jews are humans because they denied all natural rights to the Jews throughout the ride. The welfare of the people is disregarded by them as only a ration of food is given to the group as a whole to last the entire ride.
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Alex, I definitely agree that the Germans demonstrated blatant disregard for the well-being of the Jews by compelling them to the crammed cattlecarts. One point I'd like to add however, is that that torture wouldn't have even been appropriate for an animal.
ReplyDeleteI've read many other posts which also highlight the dehumanization of the cattle cart, but truthfully I think dehumanization is an understatement. The definition of humanity extends to include kindness to animals, so by this definition, forcing even livestock into such crowded spaces would be considered inhumane.
It's difficult to determine an appropriate term to describe the barbarism of the SS soldiers because it's as if our own conventional language can't fully capture the cruelty of it all. We can only recognize the fact that regardless of the diction we use, the Jews, and all of the other prisoners of this dreadful Holocaust, faced insurmountable persecution which would be deemed absurd treatment for even the lowliest of beings.
True, we would have to create a new word to describe the barbarism of the Nazi Regime toward all ethnicities, religions, & "races" they persecutes during the WWII.
DeleteI agree with you both.
ReplyDeleteIt's much harder to fathom the idea of livestock treatment (and its cruel commonality) being applied to humans with such blatancy as was done in chapter two, which is why I think Alex's analogy/simile serves as an efficient illustration to the inhumane sufferances at that instant (in the cattlecart), but technically Chinyere's point is correct in that no literary technique or amount of diction could fully capture and emit the accuracy of the inhumanity that the Jews had to deal with.