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. Option 3: Application- the essential question (Persuasive essay)
(from “Responding to Cluster Five” in Voices of the Holocaust page 142)
EQ: Given the history of prejudice in the United States, could a Holocaust happen here?
Answer the essential question in a persuasive essay using evidence from at least two of the texts in cluster five (in the Voices book); you may also use our novel, I Have Lived a Thousand Years and knowledge of current events. You may bring planning pages (graphic organizer, outline, etc.) to the final, but the essay itself must be typed in class. Your essay must be 350-500 words and be 3-5 paragraphs in length. A good persuasive essay will include::
A clear thesis statement that answers the prompt
Specific textual evidence to support your answer (properly cited)
Analysis (from you) that explains how the evidence supports your answer to the prompt
A clear conclusion that summarizes the main point(s) of your answer
Avoid use of first person pronouns (no “I” “me” “my” “we” “our”)
For all prompts, the following guidelines apply:
Do not use first or second person!
All citations must be correctly formatted
A minimum of 2 direct quotes is required
Formatting:
Times New Roman 12-point font
Set line spacing at 2
Indent each paragraph
Provide heading in upper left-hand corner of paper
Title of paper must be centered and properly capitalized (do NOT underline)
You are to write this very very persuasive essay. Make it very long and well written. I will give you 3-5 sources to use and you are to cite them with MLA parentheticals. You can say according to the author’s name, ‘’. Or you can put the info and then put the author’s name at the end in parenthesis followed by a period. No plagiarizing, make sure whatever you write that is cited is real and truthful. You will also create works cited. The date accessed is May 14, 2024. I am providing all info including text from article name author name date published and date accessed. Make it very persuasive. Use good terminology and lingo. NO UNNECESSARY INFO AND/OR FLUFF INFORMATION. If the essay does not need that sentence phrase or paragraph done, use itr. Use relevant info, don’t repeat yourself. This is for my English final. Write it well. Make sure you have a thesis supporting the argument that is clear, concise and well written. Also have a conclusion that slightly re words or restates the thesis. There should be at least 3 main ideas and concrete details with supporting commentary. Have at least 1-3 quotes and sources for each topic. Explain the quote, how it relates to the topic, why it relates and how. BE VERY SPECIFIC. Explain points. Explain what you will be talking about. It should be 5-7 paragraphs or however long it takes to get the point across. Make a works cited have concrete details and commentary be specific and make sure to use a quote to support your argument. the prompt also says to use quotes from the cluster 5. i am giving u all 5 stories. pick out quotes and anecdotes as text evidence to support. make it very strong
here are the stories:
FOR THE DEAD AND THE LIVING
Elie Wiesel
Etie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, is an author who has won the Nobel Peace Prize. This essay is adapted from the speech he gave in 1993 at the dedication of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
with the exception of israel, ours is the one country that has seen fit to make preserving the memory of the Holocaust a national imperative. When President Jimmy Carter set up the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 and appointed me chairman, I was asked about my vision of the future Holocaust Museum. I wrote one sentence, now permanently inscribed on one of its walls: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.” For not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are also responsible for what we do with those memories.
Words, images, sounds-that is the stuff of memory. Fifty years ago, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, a young Jewish woman read in a Hungarian newspaper a brief account of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Astonished, dismayed, she wondered aloud: “Why are our jews in Warsaw behaving like this? Why are they fighting? Couldn’t they have waited quietly until the end of the war?”
Treblinka, Ponar, Belzec, Chelmno, Birkenau; she had never heard of those places. One year later, together with her entire family, she ivas in a cattle car traveling to the Black Hole of History named Auschwitz.
SPEECH
127
INTO THE HANDS OF STRANGERS 1989 Mick Rooney
CN.2ENiiHNGGLSL.
Bur those places, and others, were known to officials in Washington and Landon, Moscow and Stockholm, Geneva and the Vatican After all by April 1945 nearly 4 million Jews had already perished. The Pentagon The the Sine Department knew, the White House knew, most gover ents know: orly the wilms did not know. Thus the painful question Why strent Hungarian jews, the last remnant of eastern European jewry wurned of their impending doom?
Jous of every description old and young, beggars and industrialists. sages and madmen. Ashkenazim from france and Sephardim from Greece. incellectuals from Lithuania and Hasidim from Poland-logether began their inexorable journey to a fiery altar of unprecedented dimen-Sion. Isaw them all, including the children, entering the shadow of fames.
Lighr is God’s shadow said Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher who was burned at the stake in Rome four centuries ago. I say No. It is ire thar is His shadow, the fire that consumed a third of a people whose memory of God is the most ancient in recorded history.
Inside the Kingdom of Night, we tried to understand and could not We found ourselves in an unfamiliar world, a creation parallel to God’s. with its own hierarchy, its own princes and hangmen, its own laws and customs. There were only two categories: those who were there to kill and those who were there to be killed
In Poland, SS officers used Jewish infants for targer practice. The only emotion they ever showed was anger when they missed In Kiev, an SS officer beheaded two Jewish children in front of thear mother. In anguish, she held them close and began to dance
shops with signs “Kosher Meat.”
In Romania, the Iron Guard killed Jews and displayed them in butcher As you walk through the Holocaust Museum, as you look into the eyes of the killers and their victims, ask yourselves: How could the murderer do what they did and go on living? Why was Berlin encouraged in is belef thar it could decree with impunity the humiliation, persecution extermination of an entire people? Why weren’t the railways leading fo indignation?
Eitenau bombed by Allied planes? Why was there no outcry, no publa Another question: Where did the poorly armed fighters in the gen and the forests find the courage to take on the mightest in Europe?
matched by Cod’s?
And the most awesome question of alf Why was man’ ”
128
SPEuSA
FOR THE DEAD AND THE LIVING
The questions, in fact, are endless and will forever remain unanswered. indeed, if there is a wrong answer to the holocaust, it must by definition be the wrong answer. nor is the museum an answer it id but a question mark.
Every event connected with that period defies human understanding.
It is not because I cannot explain, that you will not understand; it is because you will not understand, that I cannot explain.
The essence of this tragedy is that it can never be fully communicated.
In one of my tales, an SS officer derides a young yeshiva’ student, telling him that if he happened to survive, his words would fall on deaf ears:
“Some will laugh at you,” he says. “Others will try to redeem themselves through you
truth; but it will be the truth of a madman.”
People will refuse to believe you. You will possess the
And yet, we are duty-bound to try. Not to do so would mean to forget.
To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time. We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to vanish again. Memory is not only a victory over time, it is also a triumph over injustice.
That is one of the lessons we have learned. There are others. We have learned that though the Holocaust was principally a Jewish tragedy, its implications are universal. Though not all victims were Jewish, all jews were victims.? We have learned that whatever happens to one community ultimately affects every community. Anti-Semitism is the beginning, not the end, of a disease. Prejudice knows no boundaries. When children are killed in Bosnia, it is our humanity that has failed. When people masSacre one another in India, it is our fault too. We have learned that although every human being has the right to be different, none has the right to be indifferent to suffering.
Nevertheless, hatred continues to cause so much suffering in the world today. Religious hatred, ethnic hatred, racial hatred.
Let us therefore seize this moment to condemn the scourge of anti-Semitism, bigotry, and hatred. The bloodshed in Bosnia has to be stopped. We cannot tolerate the excruciating sights of this old new war.
I was in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep remembering what have seen. As a Jew I am saying that we have to do something to stop
1 yeshiva: Jewish school.
2 victims: Six million Jews died during the Holocaust. Five million
“undesirables” also died: Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists and political prisoners, homosexuals, and the handicapped.
SPEECH
129
VOICES OF THE HOLOCAUSI
the killing in that country. People fight each other ald children die. Why?
Something – anything — must be done to stop the bioodshed there. It wil not stop unless we stop it.
Remember the loving yet naive woman, somewhere in the tempest of fury and fire?
Carpacians, who together with most jews of her town perished in a She was my mother. a
IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMP 1941 George Grosz
GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
Nazi Survivors
See Specter of Holocaust in Bosnia’s Camps
MARY ANN LICKTEIG
Des Moines Register Staff Writer
August 23, 1992-A bony man with a shaved head and sunken eyes stares from the front page of a newspaper, and David Fishel can’t look. More eyes flash on the television screen and Morris and Sally Wolf have to change the channel.
“When we watch this,” Sally Wolf explains, “I can see my brothers.”
Linda Fishman
makes herself
watch. “I just kind of harden up,” she says. “I psych myself up and I say, You are not going to cry. You know? You have to watch it and see what’s going on.
A US. report estimates that 35,000 people have died in Bosnia, most of them in forced evacuations of Muslim villages!
The Associated Press says two
Senate Foreign Relations committee investigators spent a week in the former Yugoslavia and wrote the report. They found evidence of organized killings, rapes, beatings and starvation in deten-tom camps run by Serbs.
They heard about a camp in Breko. where most of the estimated 1,000
captives were exscuted quet a pirod a weeks. They listened 10. a N5-year-id woman describe & make shitt ramp 10 * Troopolje schooh, where guarde Tilled s woman for no zeason of tie steps of the school. She was going outside to ge water for her childres
Footage of such things reminds the Wolfs son Abe of Holocaust documen taries. “To see it in color, in the news, it’s like someone went in and sock scenes from World Wer 11 and colorous them.”
The scenes throw Holocaust sur vors into emotional turmoil. They se the world condemning Serbian pense cutors, but when it was the Jewish people suffering in Worid Wur II, they say, the world did nothing,
“The world let us die, says one.
And while
Holocaust survivors
empathize with the Bosnian Muslims they remember that Bosnian Muslims collaborated with the Nazis. They suf fered at the hands of Bosnian Muslims So some survivors have ditticulty feeling for them now, says Fishel, who lives in Windsor Heights fa suburb of Des Moines, lowa],
7 By 1995, when the war for independence for Bosnian Musims cant: 10 25
end, more than 100,000 people had dled.
ARTICLE
131
Father and son leave a war-torn Croatian village, 1991.
He understands; he was imprisoned in six camps. One of the men dangling outside his window at Blehamer was the father of one of his best friends.
“I understand that they are hurt,” he says. “I am hurt, too. But we have to put a stop to hurt, you see? We have to start somewhere.”
All survivors interviewed agreed
“I would like them to have food,” says Fishman, who was about 13 when the Germans invaded Szydlowiec, Poland, the town where she lived. Her entire family— four older sisters, two younger brothers
and her parents died in the war. Now she is 65 and lives in Windsor Heights,
“There is nothing worse than starvation; that’s why 1 say we have to feed these peo-ple.” she says. But she doesn’t think the U.S. military should get involved. “To me, it looks like another Vietnam.”
A Windsor Heights man says the world should pull out all stops. “We have to do anything. We send in troops because of oil, and here. people are dying,” says the man, who asked not to be named. “I try to live a normal life,” he explains.
He spent three years in a Lithuanian ghetto and months at the Dachau concentration camp, but some of his friends and co-workers don’t know.
Treatment of Bosnian Muslims is unconscionable, he says. “And because they are European, the world is in an uproar. How about in Africa?”
And what about the My Lai massacre, he asks. “Our boys did the same things run in villages and kill people. For what?” Jacob Waizman, a 72-year-old Des Moines man who was imprisoned for all of World War II. says, “Something has to be done to save humanity.”
To say these people are scarred for life is an understatement.
132
ANTICLE
Fishel still wakes up sweating and screaming and crying. He is 63 years old now. He has two grown daughters and four grandchildren. But he can still hear his mother screaming as the soldiers ripped him from her arms. It was the last time he saw her.
Physically, too, he is scarred. His prisoner number—184570-was tattooed on his left arm at Blehamer, a subsidiary of Auschwitz. He used to wish he could make it go away. Now, he says, “I just don’t pay any attention to it.”
Waizman has a bump on his head where he says Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, hit him with a rifle because he didn’t want to leave his mother. He has a bullet in his left leg and a white scar where another bullet hit his right leg. He was shot on a march from Hirshberg to Buchenwald because he wasn’t walking fast enough.
He has nightmares, too.
His mother’s last words to him when he was forced from her arms were, “Jacob, my son.” When he was liberated 5½ years later, he weighed 60 pounds, was lying on top of dead bodies and was picked out by American soldiers because they saw him move.
He had nearly died several times before that,
Three times came during roll call at Hirshberg. When the soldiers ordered,
“Hats down,” prisoners had to take off their hats in unison. Whoever was too
GENOCIDE IN BOSNIA
slow or too fast was shot. One Sunday, Waizman thought it was his hat that slapped late. The soldier motioned, and he stepped forward. But the soldier said,
“Nein, die andere,” which means, “No, the other.”
At other roll calls, the soldiers shot every 20th person. One time Waizman was No. 18; another time, he was No. 21.
At another camp, he was ordered to dig his own grave. He did, but before he was shot, his work foreman intervened When ordered to the Buchenwald gas chambers in a group of 25, Waizman and a friend lagged behind. When they were out of the perimeter of the observation tower’s spotlight, they hit the ground and crawled to safety.
Sally and Morris Wolf of West Des
Moines kept their past from their children as long as they could. She lost her entire family. He lost everyone including his first wife and a child except for one brother. They didn’t tell the children until the children started to ask why they didn’t have grandparents.
Even as adults, son Abe says, he and his two brothers have heard little about the war. He finds the scenes from Bosnia eerie.
They look like Nazi concentration camps to him, but he does not worry about his parents seeing them.
“Obviously, they are survivors,” he says. “They are the strongest people in the world.”
ARTICLE
133
MORE THAN AN OUNCE REQUIRED
In 2008, an organization called the Genocide Prevention Project issued a report titled More than an Ounce Required: Summoning the Political Will to Prevent Genocide and Mass Atrocity Crimes in the 21st Century!” The report identifies 1) warning signs of a potential genocide, 2) countries at high risk for genocide in the near future, and 3) recommendations to world leaders on how to prevent the unspeakable tragedies of mass atrocity.
The selection that follows is from the introductory summary.
A New Paradigm’ for Prevention
Is it possible to forecast where, and even when, the tragedies of genocide or ethnic cleansing might occur?
This report indicates that the answer is yes.
just as a change in the barometric pressure can be one indicator of a coming storm, so can political instability, rising ethnic tensions, incitement to hate, and economic and political discrimination, among other factors, signal the potential for systematic violence against civilians on a mass scale.
The places where systematic slaughter of civilians is happening or could happen are, actually, fairly well known.
But knowledge alone is insufficient to save lives. Little good is achieved, for example, if scientists believe a hurricane is imminent but fail to communicate this fact to officials who can raise the alarm, evacuate those threatened, and coordinate necessary aid.
The recent tragedies of Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina’ all bear witness to the international community’s failure to prevent systematic mass atrocity crimes (defined here as ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide). And yet, in the lead-up to each of these crises the warning signs were clear.
Going forward, the international community must heed such early warning signs, and be prepared to act quickly and effectively when the indicators show the potential for systematic atrocities.
134
1 paradigm: model or framework
2 See pages 136-137 for more information on these atrocities.
REPORT
MORE THAS AN DUINCE REQUEED
This requires that international leaders adopt a new framework, one focused on prevention. A prevention framework would have two central components:
• An early warning system to signal an escalation’ of the most serious human rights abuses against civilians based on characteristics of their identity such as race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, or religion.
• Well-coordinated and active diplomacy in the earliest stages of a brewing crisis, undertaken with the intention of averting an escalation of violence.
Such diplomatic actions-those well short of any military action— could be undertaken by the UN or individuals or groups of member states and could include both “carrots” and “sticks.”
It is the contention of this report that once civilians are being attacked, the international community is obligated to protect them from systematic mass killing.
Working to prevent or avert tragedy is not only humane, it is pragmatic. In addition to the bloody toll in human lives and suffering. atrocity crimes can bring an increase in global insecurity and the potential for regional destabilization. Furthermore, the economic cost of an intervention is more burdensome once violence has escalated.
The task at hand is, admittedly, difficult. Great challenges accompany any effort to change long-standing grievances or to improve international collaboration on issues of peace. But genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are the worst forms of mass barbarity. These are crimes that the international community is morally and legally obligated to address, not as an afterthought but as a priority.
This report calls for a new level of global and national leadership to prevent mass atrocity crimes, one marked by a willingness to act at the earliest stages to avert humanitarian catastrophe-rather than, as we have many times in the past, ignoring the warning signs and then watching as tragedy unfolds. co
3 escalation: increase or heightening
REPORT
135
GENOCIDES IN THE 20TH AND
21ST CENTURIES
In the wake of the genocide, Armenian child retugees crowd the classrooms of Syria.
Armenia (1915-1918)
Ottoman authorities massacre 1.5 million
Armenians.
Holocaust (1938-1945)
Nazis kill 6 million Jews.
Cambodia (1975-1979)
Khmer Rouge (Cambodian communists) kill 2 million
Cambodians of Chinese descent.
Students view photographs of the victims of the Khmer Rouge brutality at the Tuol Sleng Museum, once the site of a secret prison.
Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland are deported in crowded freight cars to the gas
chambers of Treblinka
Risk Factors and Other Early Warning Signs
Just as there are risk factors for illness-for instance, obesity is a risk factor for heart disease-there are indicators of the human rights abuses that can lead to systematic mass atrocity crimes. With the caveat that not every risk factor is present in every humanitarian crisis, warning signs for atrocity crimes include:
• Divisions within society by group, which may include exclusionary ideology:
• Economic and political discrimination against specific groups:
• Human flight and movement of refugees or internally displaced persons:
• Prior history of genocide or a legacy of vengeance seeking for group grievances, and
• Ideological character of the ruling party, including incitement to hate.
Srebrenica (1995)
Bosnian Serb Army massacres 8,000 Muslim men and boys, part of a larger war in Bosnia and Herzegovina that took more than 100,000 lives between 1992 and 1995.
Rwanda (1994)
Governing Hutu massacre about 800,000 civilians, almost all belonging to the minority Tutsi ethnic group.
Darfur (2003-present)
Sudan government assaults rebel groups in the Darfur region of the country.
Estimates of deaths range from 50,000 to more than 400,000.
Trucks bring in much needed supplies to Rwandan refugees who had to flee to Zaire.
Gravestones mark the tragedy of the
Srebrenica massacre
REPORT
137
OPEN LETTER TO WORLD LEADERS
Under the Genocide Prevention Project’s name, survivors of 20th-and 21 st-century genocides also issued an Open Letter to World Leaders urging them with the voices of the victims themselves to renew a commitment to preventing genocide.
December 9, 2008
An Open Letter to World Leaders,
We are survivors of the genocides that have forever stained our nations, torn apart our communities and families, and lacerated our souls. We call upon you, our leaders, to direct your highest purpose toward ending forever the agonies of mass atrocity crimes.
We approach you on behalf of our beloved dead; in their millions of voices. Brutality and violence are muting the voices of our sisters and brothers in places like Darfur, Somalia, Burma, and Congo,5 yet we can hear their pleas for protection, and we must speak for them too. We speak for the world’s children and for generations yet to come; for unless we take responsible action now, they too, in countless numbers, will pay the ultimate price.
Sixty years ago, on December 9, 1948, the world, through the United Nations, committed itself to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.
In 2005 this obligation was unanimously reaffirmed by the international community in the World Summit Outcome Document, which states that when nations manifestly fail to protect their populations, we, as an international community, “are prepared to take collective action.”
These words and our responsibility could not be clearer, yet over and over again we have witnessed the tragic failures of the international community to protect its most vulnerable populations. We speak from
4 lacerated: ripped or torn; caused deep emotional pain.
5 Somalia, Burma, and Congo: Somalia and Congo in Africa and Burma (Myanmar) in the Indian subcontinent are places where human rights violations and mass atrocities Have been committed
6 manifestly: obviously.
138
LETTER
OREN LETTER TO WORLD LEADERS
Rwanda, from Cambodia, from Bosnia and Herzegovina, from Armenia, from the Diaspora” of the Holocaust, and from the flames of Darfur: We speak because we know that until the world makes this commitment absolute, we are destined to repeat the most shameful chapters in human history
Darfur
Nemat Ahmadi, at-large member
of the Darfuri Leaders” Network
Salih Mahmoud Osman, Sudan
Organization Against Torture, Recipient of the Sakharov Prize
Armenia
Adriyan Bagciyan
Arsalos Dadir
Onorik Eminian
Perouz Kalousdian
Charlotte Kechejian
Onorik Eminian
Beba Hadzic
Alice Shnorhokian
Holocaust
Ruth R. Cohen
Marcel Drimer
Ania Drimer
Gina Lanceter
Louise Lawrence-Israels, Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands
Margit Meissner
Srebrenica
Hingeni Evernsel, Founder and director of BOSFAM*
Hatidza Mehmedovic, President of the “Srebrenica-mothers” in Srebrenica
Rwanda
Benoit Kaboyi, on behalf of the umbrella organization
representing survivors of the Rwandan Genocide (Ibuka)
Ibuka Executive Secretary
Jacqueline Murekatete, Rwandan survivor and Human Rights Activist, Jacqueline’s Human Rights Corner
Cambodia
Socheata Poeuv, child of
Cambodian survivors, Executive Director, Khmer Legacies
Theary Seng, Executive Director of the Center for Social Development
Sichan Siv, Former US
Ambassador to the UN
Jonas Weiss
Susan Weiss
4 Diaspora: places around the world where jews have dispersed.
5 BOSFAM: An organization that provides support and assistance to women affected by the Bosnian War
VIGIL FOR DARFUR
by Sabina Carlson
Hold up your candie if you are an angel, Hold up your candle if the light of hope dances and curls about your spine like the breath of light about the wick.
Or blow out your candle if you believe
that when
these flames ficker our
we will forget
the faces we now see before us: the faces of the hopeful,
and the memory of the abused.
Hold up your candle
if the people standing alongside you have become your wings, so that side by side we fly
to a better place and time.
Hold up your candle if you know that sound does not travel
through air and wires but rather through the chords
of our hearts and that we will never be able to claim that we could not hear a single cry because a deafening ocean stood berween us.
Hold up your candle if you remember how the world forgot 800 thousand Rwandans,
hold up your candle if you have a hole burnt into your heart
140
POEM
VIGIL FOR DARFUR
by the Shoah,’ the Great Fire,
the Holocaust
and hold up your candle if you can still see the smoke
and taste the ashes.
Hold up your candle if you know that tears only feed that fire.
And hold up your candle if you refuse to let the world sob itself to sleep, waiting for a wish, because we did not listen to them, because we did not burn with them, because we did not tell them
7jam
going
to save you, Here,
I am your miracle.*
For who
dares to say that miracles are simply the dusted spines of Bibles?
Friends, look
at the crying wings you stand
side by side with, listen to the heavenly psalms of hope and hurt, feel your heart rise
through the halo above your head to join with a hundred thousand others who will heal this world.
hold up your candle if you are an angel.
1 Shoah: Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe” and used to refer to the killing of mations of European Jews during World War Il:
Holocaust
POEM
141
Use especially open letters to worls hereoes. When discussing a main topic u cxan js say. Although we have measures to prevent such an atrociuty of happening again such as blahj blahj blah in the open letters to world leaders book it will make the argument stronger. Be spceiifc make the argument strong use a lot of key details and concrete details that r strpog and provide useful commentary.