Affirming Man's Dignity

Affirming Man's Dignity

Affirming Man's Dignity

Only three million Jews lived through the World War II, and some of them were now the strongest men alive. Among these people, Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl were two victims, who now lived and passed their experiences of themselves being to several concentration camps and finally survived. They had similar perspectives on the issues of suffering, love, and memory. "Suffering... adds a deeper meaning to his life... The salvation of man... in love," Frankl said in "Man's Search For Meaning", an article he wrote about Jews. "Man's dignity; it exists only in memory," Wiesel, the author of Night, said. Night was a powerful memoir reviewing the Holocaust and the movement of Jews between concentration camps, that were filled with tremendous labor, hunger, and isolation. In addition to the terrors encountered in these concentration camps, more than six million Jews were dehumanized, beaten, and killed by SS guards. In Night, Elie Wiesel affirmed man's dignity by recording his memories and passing on his experience, that many times suffering and retention his memories leads to a greater human dignity and moral strength, as well as the salvation through love.
Suffering, a main point in life as Viktor Frankl had said, made men different by giving them a deeper meaning in life. When the Jews were tortured by the SS guards, Wiesel once said, "We were no longer afraid of death... and gave us new confidence in life"(57). As atrocities increased, their fear of the SS guards destroying their faith was decreased, and their new hope for a new life grew because of the belief that the bad parts must end. Their new meanings in life were to find the lost joy. Once, after the Jews ran miles in the snow to a new camp, Wiesel said, "Yes, man is very strong, greater than God"(64). The Jews' anger made themselves stronger and forced themselves to realize the truth, that the God they had always believed in did not exist anymore. This caused them to think of...