Erin Seeman

Mrs. Kepros

College reading

9/29/13

Over the past month we have been learning about genocide through movies, books and articles.  When I think back on everything we have learned I think that Evil outweighs good. When we read the book Night I could not believe all the terrible things that were happening to these innocent men and women.  The book Night is about Elie Wiesel’s journey through the Holocaust at the Nazi concentration camps, and the ropes he had to go through and how he actually lived through the Holocaust. This is a true story.

Within the book Night there are many examples of evil outweighing good. When they first arrive to Auschwitz and they split the men and women up, and they send the women and their kids to the crematory. Actually they were all told they were taking showers and they had them strip there close off. They were all clueless that they were about to die. The crematory is a place where they send the innocent people to take “showers” and after they are all in there they drop this toxic gas (zyklon B) through these holes and it kills all the people. There is nothing good about this it is just all evil. And this is one reason I think evil outweighs good.

Another reason I see that evil outweighs good is when they have everyone gather around and watch them hang that young kid (Reichsfuhrer Himmler) and his neck was too small for the noose so they had to watch him die of a slow and painful death and he hung there for at least a half an hour. The 13 year old boy (Reichsfuhrer Himmler) was hanged because he stole during the air raid. And even though he did steal stuff this still isn’t fair and it is evil.

Also I see that evil outweighs good when they execute millions of innocent people and send them to the crematory. But then they turn around and have an infirmary! What!? That doesn’t make any sense at all of all the terrible things they do to people, they hang them and  throw them in the crematory but they will help the people that are sick or have other issues with sore feet and so on. To me that doesn’t make sense because you think that would just be one more reason they would kill an innocent human being. Like they’ve done many times before for absolutely no reason at all.  

I think throughout this book there are many examples as to how evil outweighs good but the last piece I am going to talk about is evacuation day at Auschwitz, the innocent people had no Idea where they were headed but they had to run all the way there. Well the SS officers got to switch in and out with other SS officers when they got tired. They were evacuating because the Russians were coming. They ran all night and into the morning and stopped at this abandoned building. I can’t even imagine running for ten minutes straight let alone all night and into the morning. That is just evil for sure!

All in all, the four different pieces I talked about throughout this paper best describes that evil outweighs good! Everything that went on at Auschwitz was just peer evil, the hangings, the millions of people that died in the crematory and making them run all night and into the next day, and this is just a few of the terrible things the SS men did to these innocent people. There is millions of people dead because of the Holocaust and there was really no reason for it at all.