Anti-Semitism existed long before the time of the Holocaust. It dates back to the early centuries AD, around the time Christianity spurred as a religion all over the eastern world. Christian Anti-Semitism was prevalent very soon after its creation. Constantine the Great of the Holy Roman Empire demanded Jews convert to Christianity, but they resented and he made their life a complete and utter hell for it.

Both the Church and the State made moves towards the Jewish population, just like Hitler’s regime would centuries later. Hitler stared his movement by gradually stripping the rights, boycotting shops, taking away citizenship, and sterilizing of the Jews. Krystalnacht played an integral role within the switch from Phase I to Hitler’s Final Solution. During Krystalnacht, the Germans caused so much damage upon the Jews and blamed them as well. They showed no mercy and burned all the synagogues and religious scripts. Hitler stepped over the line of no return and essentially declared war upon the Jews. He was not interested in making the Jews feel absolute misery; he was now focused on annihilating them. The Final Solution was now in step, and on the night of Krystallnacht he started to deport thousands of Jews to the concentration camps where six million would eventually die.

Identity, membership, and universe of obligation were the governing ideas that surrounded the Holocaust. The Jews were forced to accept their identities and were prosecuted for who they were by the Nazis. The Jews banded together in resistance and became members of the resistance against Hitler, and they felt obligated to each other as well as themselves to fight for what they believed in and to mark themselves upon the Earth as a worthy and equal people. The Jews all stood up for their freedom, but some extraordinary people made a special effort to lead the resistance and they were the upstanders.

They were not afraid of their fate, and they knew only that they were obligated to their fellow Jews to lead the effort. There were no Jewish bystanders to my knowledge, and I don’t consider the ones who were lucky enough not to be deported as bystanders. Every Jew, even today, still suffers the Holocaust. The Germans had a choice to accept the Nazi identity, the identity that would help the Jews, or the bystander identity. The majority chose the Nazi, but many also joined the Jewish cause. The people who helped the Jews felt obligated to them and the human race as a whole, and they acted on it for what they believed to be morally correct.

On the other hand, some chose to follow Hitler merely because they were raised to hate Jews or they felt scared to deny the Hitler regime. They sought membership because they couldn’t find their true identity and weren’t strong enough to express it. The global community has only one obligation, and that is to itself. Its job is to prevent events such as the Holocaust, and to act as one whole upstander against them. Without that, all individuals may have an identity, but no one can have the identity of a human species all together.

While reading Night, I remembered one event very well. When Moshe the Beadle escaped from Gestapo control and returned to Sighet, he started telling stories of the atrocities he saw and experienced. He talked of the train ride through the Hungarian frontier and onto Polish territory, and how they had stopped in the middle of a forest and made to dig enormous graves. Moshe said the Jews were lined up in front of the graves and shot one by one until none remained alive. The babies were slung into the air and made targets for the Germans’ machine guns. Moshe had miraculously escaped, taken for dead after being wounded in the leg. When he returned to Sighet, no one believed his story and they thought he wanted others to pity him; they thought the poor soul had been driven mad. Even Elie Wiesel didn’t believe Moshe. This event shows how ignorant people are of what happens in the world. The Jews didn’t believe Moshe because they couldn’t even imagine how the Germans could do such horrible things to other humans. It was unfathomable. It is in human nature that people strive to stay in the realm of knowledge and not travel into the unknown. If I was a Jew back then, I probably wouldn’t have believed Moshe either. The events he talked about would have not registered in my head as anything close to the truth. When reading this section of the memoir, I felt very mad because Moshe was telling the others of what was to come, and if they had listened to him they might have been able to save themselves.

The article “Ex-guard says she “did nothing wrong” – and her silence “was my business,” was what really stood out to me during all our reading assignments for the Holocaust Unit. Elfriede Rinkel, when a young woman, was a factory worker during the time of the Holocaust. She wanted easier work, so she became one of 958 German women who served as guards at Ravensbruk. Her job was a mere walk the prisoners, and make sure they don’t escape their confines. After the Holocaust, she moved to the United States under a Visa sponsorship and she married Fred Rinkel, a Holocaust survivor. For forty-two years, Elfriede did not disclose the information about her previous employment to him and even today, she still does not believe she did anything wrong! She claims there was no choice in her work and that she did not like it, but never once did she apply for a new position. It’s people like Elfriede that really sicken me.

After working for the Nazi organization and participating in the horrible events of the Holocaust, she didn’t even admit her wrongdoings or show regret. When given a chance to redeem herself, she kept this information a secret from everyone. Finally, justice caught up with her and she was forced to come clean. The important thing to learn from this story is that justice will not relent, and all wrong-doers will be caught and revealed to the world. I just hope that Mrs. Rinkel thinks about what she did every day of her life and pleads for forgiveness.

The topic for my research project was Stalin’s Gulag. Joseph Stalin was a leader of the Soviet Union and his Gulag was a system of forced penal labor camps. This genocide was extremely interesting to research about, especially because the only one I knew about beforehand was the Holocaust. What really struck me as most interesting was that approximately fifty million people died in the Gulags, out of which approximately twenty million during Stalin’s reign. I did not even know about this genocide before it was introduced to me, and I was more astonished to find out that ten times more people died in the Gulag than the Holocaust. While my group did basic research on the Gulags, Megan and Kelly did some inside information on the Ukrainian Genocide, which was very related to Stalin’s Gulag. Stalin initiated a Great Purge, where he rid the country of all the people he didn’t want in the USSR, including the Ukrainians, Military Officers, and the people who helped him gain his government position. He also purposely increased the taxes and collection amounts of peasant families’ crops, starting a great famine. A lot of the modern day genocides have leaders that suggest they only acted for a greater cause, usually purging society of people or things that were holding it back. To me, this seems like a very badly rehearsed excuse. The Holocaust and Stalin’s Gulag, as well as the Ukrainian Genocide, are very closely related in their mechanics. All three were geared towards “exterminating” specific populations via cruel, demoralizing, harsh, and torturing conditions. The people affected were literally treated like dirt.

The major difference I saw was that in the Holocaust, the Jews didn’t know what was going on at all. In the other genocides, it was well known what was going to happen, as well to whom it was going to happen to. The Holocaust was more of an extermination, while the Ukrainian Genocide and Stalin’s Gulag were excuses for promoting the welfare of a nation. In the end, although there are similarities and differences between them, genocides are still genocides.

To make a difference in the world, all one has to have is a good idea. People have the common misconception that they have to be an important figure in society to make this difference. World leaders work towards the same goals as the global community; stop AIDS, cease child labor, decrease poverty, spread democracy, promote women’s’ rights. The globally powerful people often have the resources to take action against these problems, but they lack the foundation that can start the effort. It is the small people in society, like students in a club and ordinary people walking the streets, that possess the willpower to make a difference.

Together, with the ideas of the common people and the resources of the globally powerful, To make a difference, all one has to do is get together a group of friends with a common idea to help others, and then carry out an event that may help. The most basic task is to spread awareness and to try to get others to help in the cause. One person with a great idea isn’t quite as meaningful as many people with a common idea. Though the motion might start slow, it will build up just like a club’s members. As students, my peers and I can raise a few thousand dollars here and there, and then send it to an organization across the world in order to possibly get them sanitary bathrooms or more nutritious food. Even though we can only give them a little, it is better than nothing.

Every little act of kindness builds up, and with enough people doing what they can for others, big changes can occur. Helping others isn’t just a one-time thing, so the global community shouldn’t be worrying about the future; they should be worrying about right now. Without fixing the present, we cannot hope to promote the welfare of human beings in the future.