hi! i've been learning about ww2, particularly, the holocaust for 2 months and it was…grueling. it's my own decision, of course, and i know that learning about it is necessary. it's just that i have never read and watch something as extreme as this. while watching the last documentaries i chose to watch, i just felt like crying but no tears fell. i don't know.
after all the things that i watched and read, i feel like i became kind of numb (is this normal?). can you suggest books that can ignite my hope again for the world and humanity?
by Rude-Blood4903
2 Comments
La Sociedad de la Nieve / The Snow Society, Pablo Vierci.
It’s not light reading either – it’s about a group of people who collectively survived the unsurvivable. There are no human antagonists. The sixteen of them who made it – plane crash, 72 days left for dead on a glacier, self-rescue via relay race and (very) amateur mountaineering – made it not only because of chance and perserverence but because the group cared for each other. Because they responded to the impossible odds and massive death by turning to each other.
It won’t counter-balance the holocaust, no. There will always be a threshold of terrible circumstance and institutional levels of human cruelty that no amount of pro-social behavior can overcome. Even on the scale of this story, there were 33 deaths (to plane crash trauma, hypothermia, avalanche, infection, and starvation) and 16 survivors.
But also humans are fucking amazing, and this book, this story, these people, are an astounding reminder of that. It’s also a story that’s likely to hit as extremely real, extremely meaningful, and devastatingly worthwhile, for those of us with the sort of macabre minds that are drawn to look for light in the dark.
(It’s a collective memoir with chapters from each of the 16 survivors of the crash of the Uruguayan Fairchild F571 in 1972)
……
(*I grow a white rose / in July as in January / for the friend who offers me his hand sincerely / and for the cruel man who tears out / the heart with which I live /I grow neither nettles nor thorns / I grow a white rose* – Jose Marti)
Given the knowledge that you’ve got about the holocaust, which made you question- and in a way be emotionally disturbed as most caring people would be in such a case; thinking how tragedy like the Holocaust could be cause by fellow human beings? The first reaction would be depressing, yes, that’s normally what decent people would feel, but I guess it doesn’t have to end in that way in our quest to know the truth about being human. Like you I got curious with the Holocaust, too, and maybe have the same reception and reaction with the horrors of it. I read a lot about it, watched documentaries and films about it, and mind you not just the Holocaust, but as well as other human tragedies like the Nanking massacre, and found, so far, best books that could help you answer the questions why such human brutality could have happened at all. These are the books that I want you to check on:
1 . The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm
2. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
3. Eichmann In Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt