Love and Laughter in Holocaust Essay Example

“...The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew”-Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf). The Holocaust was a situation where not only millions of deaths occured, but it killed many peoples’ spirit, or their will to live rather than merely exist, simply due to the religion they practiced. In these kinds of situations, it was extremely hard to maintain their inner mind. The victims of the Holocaust had to grasp onto the little things that they had left in order for them to triumph, or rise above the horrors that they were forced to go through and witness. The things that helped them triumph included small moments of laughter, the love they had for the people they had left and especially the beauty of the small bit of nature they were permitted to see. 

Laughter was fleeting during the Holocaust, but when there were small moments of it, they aided in helping people somewhat frget the situation and rise above. Whether it was a young girl hiding from the Nazis or a family that’s hiding someone in their home, laughter has a large presence in all of these documents. In the poem titled “Love”, there is a moment described where the writer, a young girl named Syvia, says something that makes “everyone… burst into laughter” (Doc A) and even the sister who was painted as “in a bad mood” (Doc A) begins laughing. Syvia is later described as a way to help the family forget their pain (Doc A). There is another glimpse at laughter in another document, where the author is a young girl harboring a Jewish man in her foster family’s basement. The girl, Liesel, decides to bring the man buckets of snow from outside her house. This results in an all out snowball fight, where “they could not contain the small snatches of laughter” (Doc C). These pieces of evidence paint a picture of how laughter aided people in forgetting what kind of environment they were in. It gave them one little moment of joy to hold on to.

Love for the very few people that the Holocaust victims had was something that gave their life meaning beyond existing. With the way that people were treated, any type of love was necessary. In a poem, from the book Yellow Star, there is a moment where the girl named Syvia risks her life in a moment of love for her family. Syvia, who was one of twelve children left in the Lodz ghetto, wanders out from the cellar she’s been hiding in to see the environment around her. She finds a pear, which she describes as “solid, smooth, real” (Doc B). As she begins running back to the cellar, she spots another pear making her “...think of Dora, and I grab it,” (Doc B). In this example, a little girl puts grabbing a pear for her sister over getting caught by the Nazis and getting sent to her death. This also shows Syvia’s love, not only for her family, but for nature as well. In another poem from the same book, Syvia describes the sacrifice her mother makes out of love for her daughter. Syvia describes how “Mother does not eat her meal. She gives it to me instead,” showing how Syvia’s mother knows that there is not enough food for dinner, so she gives up her own food so her daughter can have a full meal. These situations show how people showed their love in alternative ways other than words.

While laughter and love helped people get through this time, nature was one of the nuggets things that let people get away from the horrendous environment they were in. Even when they had a very limited amount of nature they were allowed to see, just a glimpse of what the world could look like gave people hope for what could come. Nature gave the Holocaust victims something to be hopeful for. Anne Frank was a thirteen year old girl whose family hid from the Nazis into what Anne called the “Secret Annexe”. She kept a journal, and logged everyday. In one of Anne’s entries she describes the view that she sees from a window in an attic saying that “‘ As long as this exists,’ I thought ‘and I may live to see it , this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy’” (Doc D). Anne is stating that even though there is the threat of death all around, she cannot be unhappy simply because of the view. She continues on, describing the importance of nature, and how “God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature,” (Doc D). She finishes off the entry by simply stating that “nature brings solace to all troubles”, painting a picture of just how Anne believed that nature is truly the answer to all problems. Etty Hillesum was also another young girl during the Holocaust, but she was in a transit camp, awaiting her death. In the letters she wrote to her friends in Amsterdam she describes how merely looking at the sky with her friend makes them feel “a lot less oppressed” (Doc E). In another letter, Etty spots a rainbow over the camp. While coming back to the barracks, someone asks Etty the reason for the happy look on her face (Doc E). She “considered saying something about…peace being on the way,” and she says that she couldn’t “fob them off with the rainbow” (Doc E). Etty finishes off her letter by saying that the only reason for her joy was seeing that rainbow. In ghettos or hiding , it was easy to forget that there 

was a world outside of the situation. Nature reminded the Holocaust victims that there was still something out there to believe in.

Nature is one of the biggest things that helped the Holocaust victims forget the atrocities that filled the air around them. Over half of all the documents talk about nature being the reason that people have an escape, a window into what the world looked like without the Holocaust. For Etty, the only reason for her joy was not something philosophical or anything related to peace, but simply the sight of a rainbow, a sign of joy over a camp full of people waiting to die (Doc E). Anne Frank makes her love of nature very clear, explaining that “God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature,”(Doc D) and that no matter the situation, she cannot be unhappy while nature exists and she lives to be able to see it. In the poem “The Pear”, love may seem as though it is the biggest presence, but nature is what caused the love, as well a love of nature. Syvia describes how just being outside makes her feel “like any normal girl who isn’t Jewish in Poland, on a regular day,”(Doc B) merely the feeling of being outside of the cellar where she was hiding let her forget what it felt like to be in her situation. It helped her see a place where she was just a normal girl. Love and laughter gave people something to live for, but nature let them see what was possible.