Holocaust Project Blog #3: What Juliek was Thinking When he Played his Violin

Themes: Freedom, Impacts of the Holocaust (Connects with most displays)

I am still here today. I don't know how. I don't know why. I don't know anything. The Nazi's have taken everything from me. They took my family, then my clothes, then my name, then my strength. However, there's one thing they haven't taken from me yet. My soul. My violin.

Yet still I am here. I don't care what they do to me anymore though as long as I have my violin. What can they do anyways? They have already taken everything from me. And if they take my violin, they have taken my life.

*starts playing violin*

Right now, I'm starving, but I'm being filled with the beauty of music. Right now, I'm bitterly cold, yet I'm warmed by the beauty of music. All of a sudden, I realize that I am now a free person. I'm playing Beethoven right now but they can't do anything about that. Music has brought me to realize that nothing can hurt me right now: not the wind, not the cold, not the hunger, and not the Nazi's. With the power of music, I am able to go to a completely new world, where nothing can touch me, and I'm safe from whatever harm that could come my way.

I am free. I am free... I am free.........

Holocaust Project Blog #2

Artifact: Music of Beethoven, which was banned by the Nazi's

Passage: Night pg. 94-95

"Those were my thoughts when I heard the sound of a violin. A violin in a dark barrack where the dead were piled on top of the living? Who was this madman who played the violin here, at the edge of his own grave? Or was it a hallucination?

It had to be Juliek.

He was playing a fragment of a Beethoven concerto. Never before had I heard such a beautiful sound. In such silence.

The darkness enveloped us. All I could here was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future. He played that which he would never play again."

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One of the most touching moments throughout Night by Elie Wiesel is Wiesel's recount of Juliek's violin performance when the entire group was huddled in in an old wooden building on a bitter cold night. What makes this a particularly moving part of the book is the fact that everybody in the concentration group essentially had nothing left with them except themselves, and whatever few personal belongings that they were able to salvage throughout their life in the concentration camp; in Juliek's case, his violin. By playing his violin until what was probably his death, Juliek is able to die in a peaceful state, and "prove" to the Nazi's that they can't take everything away from him. 

The first thing that is crucial to note about Juliek's solo is the fact that the piece that he played was a work of Beethoven's, a famous German composer of the 18th century. It turns out however that Jews were actually banned from playing music written by German composers during the Holocaust. This could be viewed as an act of rebellion by Juliek demonstrating that the Nazi's couldn't hurt him anymore. Juliek didn't care what the set standards were for the prisoners at the time, and that he was playing the violin in order to stay true to himself. One can view this in a sense that Juliek has finally obtained freedom from the trap he has lived in for such a long time.

The idea that Juliek achieved a sense of freedom by playing his violin is also supported by Wiesel's description of the performance. Wiesel writes: "All I could here was the violin and it was if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings." One can only imagine how engrossed Juliek must have been into the violin at that moment in time. At that moment, he was not thinking about the past, nor was he worrying about the future. He was just living the moment as if he had nothing to lose at that point. "He played that which he would never play again."

Holocaust Project Blog #1: How can something like the Holocaust Happen?

Artifact 1: Illustration from The Poisonous Mushroom

Artifact 2: Hitler Youth Rally

Artifact 3: Excerpt from interview with Eva Galler

"They took us to a cattle train. People started to run away from the train, but they were shot. Once on the train we had to stand because there was no room to sit down .... Many jumped. The SS on the rooftop of the train shot at them with rifles...
My brother Berele jumped out, then my sister Hannah, and then I jumped out. The SS men shot at us. I landed in a snowbank. The bullets did not hit me. When I did not hear anything anymore, I went back to find my brother and my sister. I found them dead. My brother Berele was 15. My sister Hannah was 16. I was 17.”

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Whenever people are talking about the Holocaust, the same question is going through everybody's head: How could something as terrible as the Holocaust happen? How could human beings become so insensible that they could murder millions of people without feeling any emotion? How could this horrific crime have remained a secret for such a long time? Without a doubt, the answer to these questions has to deal with Hitler's (and the Nazi Party's) creation of an industrial-like death machine, as well as his ability to brainwash and dehumanize basically the entire German population. The photos and documents shown above are just a few examples of the many ways that the Nazi Party was able to transform the perceptions of the German population, and how they were able to convince them that the mass persecution of a single race is acceptable.

The first artifact, an illustration from the German Children's book The Poisonous Mushroom by Julius Streicher, is a perfect example of the measures taken in order to transform the German Youths' perception of the Jewish population. In the story, a woman and her young son are in a forest planning to gather mushrooms, until the boy comes up to a patch of poisonous mushrooms. The woman then goes on to explain the necessity to be able to distinguish the difference between good mushrooms and poisonous mushrooms. As the story goes on, the incident with the mushrooms serves as an analogy for the necessity to be able to distinguish people of the "master race" (good people) from the  inferior people, primarily Jews (bad people). In the caption below the picture, children are taught that "the Jewish nose looks crooked at its tip. It looks like the number 6." This illustration is one of the many that taught German youths how to distinguish Jewish people, which further emphasized the viewpoint that Jewish people are inferior. 

Also tied into the Nazi Party's movement to dehumanize the German people was the formation of Hitler's Youth campaign. In these movements, which were first established in the early 1930s, German youths were taught to love and embrace Nazism, and were brainwashed into believing that the Nazi Party was the most successful regime in the world. However, the tasks that the Hitler Youth had to go through were extremely demanding, and it included hours of military training for boys, and lessons on childbearing and housekeeping for girls. Hitler made it clear in what he wanted from the youths of Germany, saying: "The weak must be chiselled away. I want young men and women who can suffer pain. A young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel." In artifact two, one can clearly see the order and discipline in that group of German youths. In addition to that, it is easy to see that the members of the Hitler Youth were dedicated to their party by the fact that they marched together in the symbol of the Swastika, which just shows how corrupted their minds really were.

However, on a different note now, a crucial reason why the Nazi death-machine was able to occur was due to the fact of the complete secrecy of the operation. It turns out that most of the Jews that were sent to concentration camps during the Holocaust had never heard of the word "Auschwitz" until after they arrived there, which was certainly true in the case of Elie Wiesel. The main reason why Auschwitz was essentially unheard of at the time was due to the fact that once someone arrived at Auschwitz (or any other camp), there would be no way out unless they were led by German soldiers. Furthermore, the Jews which were sent to concentration camps had no idea where they were going to in the first place, as German soldiers told them that they would be going to a "better place." Then, after realizing where they were, any attempts at escape were futile. As recounted by Eva Galler in an interview, anybody who jumped or tried to run away from the German soldiers was immediately shot by SS men located on roofs armed with rifles. When Galler's family tried to escape by running away, they were all shot at, which is how Galler's brother and sister died. The emotional pain from these events, as well as the inability to escape all led to the clandestine nature of the concentration camps. 

Obviously these three examples of the events going on in Germany during the period of the Holocaust weren't the only things that made such a horrific event in world history possible. After all, in order to completely understand how something like this could happen, one would also have to understand what could allow humans become so malicious and evil in the first place. This question, I believe, only Hitler himself could have answered.