1. In my opinion, that the girl so young could hate the Jews so much that she kept shouting “Goodbye Jews!”, throwing mud at them as they were marching to the imprisoning ghetto, was because of how her mind had been programmed to hate the Jews. I believe such animosity was planted and nurtured in this society, and over time, with extreme nationalism and intolerance towards differences, the prejudice grew stronger and stronger. The girl was one of those that grew up in the environments in which the Jews were portrayed as evils, as inferior people, who were living in her country as leeches. It might have happened so repeatedly that the Jews were talked as those whose lives were worthless and being treated in that inhumane way was what they deserved.
Because of the environments that surrounded her, she was feeling hatred and prejudice against the Jews. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand how she could enjoy such terrible occurrences. For sure, people feel some sort of satisfaction when those viewed as their enemies, those that they abhor, crumble apart and suffer.
2. In Goeth’s many attempts to shoot the Rabbi, who – because of some other work had been engagement in other work earlier that day – couldn’t make as many bolts as Goeth was satisfied about, failed repeatedly as his gun couldn’t fire. There may be a number of reasons behind this. Perhaps, that was purely coincidence; the mis-functioning of the gun just happened to occur when Goeth was trying to shoot the Rabbi. Or maybe it was a result of some resistance of some holy spirits that the Jews believed in; it may have been intended as some sort of miracle, as the proof that God acted. It is also possible that the gun was simply broken and not usable anymore. Later in the movie, there weren’t any mention of the gun and probably it had n ever become into use again.
3. Whenever such topics as the holocausts, genocides, wars, and all the killings come into discussion, the storm of curiosity always seems to flood my mind. It’s never easy to understand how my fellow human beings could do something so brutal, so inhumane and devastating. What were they thinking? Were they out of their mind?
I guess, the guards (at Aushwitz or at Tuol Sleng) could live their lives normally despite their witnessing countless acts of cruelty and torture over other humans because they had somehow found the way to get used to it. After a series of mass murdering kept happening days after days, such abhorrent acts became no longer shocking to them; they became normal and habitualized. It may be very likely that at first it was hard and they somehow got affected; however, over time, it no longer mattered. It came to the point when their conscience learned to accept that it was okay to kill lives that meant nothing to them.
Plus, under the Nazi ideology that disregards any values of the Jews, among those guards, the belief of Jews being the bad, intruding people and their worthlessness was so widely held that loathing and satisfaction from seeing Jew’s death were felt over sympathy.
Nonetheless, not everyone did manage to get by and feel totally undisturbed by all the brutality. It was written and described in the book that some needed to go out during the evening to seek for pleasure with food, alcohol and women so that their minds were distracted from the atrocious images they had witnessed during the day.
4. Whether evil exist is truly a difficult concept to determine. Considering the case of Amon Goeth, it is undoubtedly very unreasonable of him to go around killing people without any trace of regret at all; he seemed to have no respect of the lives of the Jew in the slightest. One scene in the movie, Schindler said how the prisoners’ lives meant nothing to Goeth and it didn’t bother whether those people continued to live or got shot in the head for whatever reasons. Obviously, he surely didn’t seem to give a damn at all about those people’s lives.
But was he just doing well what he was supposed to do as a big military man? Did his job make him this quick to kill other people? Or was it an evil inside that made him who he was and did what he did.
In my opinion, the arguments of existence of evil insides the person who does evil sound more convincing to explain such unbelievably dreadful acts of Goeth. I think evil exists, and in the case of what happened in the Nazi regime, I believe evil existed, got spread and grew. It might start with a few people with the believability and convincingness to spread and plant in people’s head their evil ideology, and then this evil started to grow and lead the way those killers act. It’s true that all those soldiers did what they had to do, but many of them did seem to do something so repugnant with a laugh, with no regret, with no resistance to authority, and with no any conviction, whatsoever. In other words, they seemed to kill with joy. Therefore, I think Amon Goeth was evil.
5. It is amazing how an intelligent man like Amon Goeth could do something so unethical and so barbaric, treating his fellow humankind as badly as they were roaches. I think it was just how he nurtured to be, by his surroundings. Over his life, he might have been taught how strong he should be, how manipulative and abusive a man at his position should be, how mercy was not in question, etc. His mind may have been programmed to give values to lives of the Jews no more values than rats and roaches. He might have been filled with hatred and the belief that Jews were criminals and thus prisoners whose lives did not deserve to be spared.
With so much power given to him, Goeth seemed to have gone made with it and become really obsessed with abusing it to any extent possible. That he could go around pointing a gun and pulling the trigger at any Jew’s head might have well catered to his sense of being powerful and being the one to fear. I think he was so obsessed with the power and immunity that he was allowed that he overused it.
6. I strongly believe that there is nothing in the world that these 6 million Jews had done to make them deserve the overly horrible fates they received. There is just never a good enough reason to murder so many people, and I believe everyone in their right mind can easily agree with me on this one. They were just living their lives, maybe not in a completely identical way, like the Germans, the Spanish, the Chinese etc. and other billions of people that have lived on Earth. I am sure that some individuals of them may have done something ethically unacceptable, something as grave as killing other people; however, these can never ever make killing 6 millions of their people justifiable. How about those babies and those children, whose hands were so white and innocent? Why were their lives put to such a tragic end? Never ever is there a good enough reason to justify this disgusting act of the Nazi.
7. “He who saves one life, saves the world entire,” inscribed on the ring given to Schindler by the grateful Jews. To my knowledge of English, I don’t even think this is grammatically-correctly written (and I’m sure I’m the one with not-extensive-enough knowledge), making it hard for me to even make out its literal meaning. Whose was that one life in particular? Why was it just one life while apparently Schindler saved so many?
On quite a rough analysis of mine, one pretty vague interpretation can be drawn. That is, that one life may be his – the life that he saved and continued living to go on and make thousands of other lives possible and not taken away. As all lives make up this world, saving one, as well as thousand others, help save the world as a whole.
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