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.
