Life Is Beautiful Holocaust Analysis

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The 1930s and 1940s was a period that greatly revealed the character of people, showing the true ugly side of how people treated people. The atrocities committed by the Nazis and the Japanese Empire from the buildup to WWII and during WWII are the greatest examples of the horrors that people can commit when driven by hate. However, the savagery performed by the Nazis on those they saw unfit in Europe is one of the most documented horrors in history, and the Jews were the majority of victims in the Holocaust. During their survival in Concentration Camps, those who suffered from the Nazis went through many changes in their lives, such as a change in their character, and, or changes in their faith (both in religion and people). The stories Night…show more content…
In the film Life is Beautiful, Dora, the main character’s wife, sacrifices her comfortable life to go with his son and husband to Auschwitz (although she was unaware of the horrors committed in the camp), and she is immediately put into labor. Dora herself was not a Jew, but she was willing to sacrifice her life for her family. Furthermore, while Dora is in the camp, she is told by a fellow prisoner of the fate of children at the camp, and she grows fearful and loses hope at the thought of losing Joshua. Throughout her time at the camp, the viewer is shown how the strenuous conditions of Auschwitz and the belief that Joshua is dead is slowly breaking her, and it’s only Guido’s attempts to communicate that keep her going. Dora already was not a victim of prejudice, but her treatment at the death camp pushed her to the edge. Similarly, Elie reaches his breaking point at the loss of his father, just prior to his liberation from the Nazis. Throughout the novel, Elie and his father agree to keep each other alive as they are the only remnants of their family left, but it becomes too difficult as his father grows sick. After his father eventually dies of sickness, Elie says that his life “no longer mattered. Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore,” (Wiesel 113). Elie then continues to live his final days in the camp as if in a trance, and he describes everything numbly and in very little detail. Essentially, Elie’s only reason for staying alive had been taken away from him, and that was enough for him to give up. Wiesel describes himself as uncaring before he was liberated, the only thing he cared for was soup. The Holocaust left Wiesel broken, defeated, and without a family. At this point, he no longer cared whether he lived or died because the Nazis took his life away from
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