Roland Achuko

UWRT-1102-003
10/21/15
Weekly Writing 6 Assignment
My source this time is an article titled The Feelings of Holocaust Survivors Towards
Their Persecutors by Shalom Robinson, M.D.,* Michal Rapaport-Bar-Sever, M.D. and Sara
Metzer, B.A. . This article deals with the attitudes holocaust survivors had towards their
oppressors. The method of getting this information was to interview 28 holocaust survivors with
a set of questions. These questions were what their life before the holocaust, what was their
experience during the Holocaust, what was it like to be liberated and moved to Israel, what were
their feelings like towards the perpetrators, what where their feelings towards the Germans like
before and after the war.
My paper is one revenge efforts by Holocaust survivors. So it is very important to know
what the opinions of the Jewish people were towards their suffering as this would have affected
the intensity and support of retributive attacks. Reading this article there were a few quotes that
stood out to me as they gave me new things to think about for this topic.
We study the letters and diaries left by the persecuted Jews, the wish for vengeance is
very strong. Gutman thinks that perhaps these feelings of revenge were part of what helped the
survivors to stay alive in the last and difficult part of their time in the concentration camps. He
notes that in reality there were minimal acts of vengeance carried out by the survivors. This
very interesting to me since, looking back on all the material Ive learned about the holocaust, I
cannot recall anything discussing revenge efforts by the Jewish people. In fact when looking up

sources it was difficult to find some dealing with this issue in detail. This is in spite of the fact
that the holocaust is a well-researched topic. A lot of this most likely has to do with the fact that
concentrating on survival and rebuilding after the holocaust were more important to the Jewish
people. So what this quote says to me that there was at least an implicit support of revenge
efforts by the Jewish people even though there wasnt much of it.
They felt that they couldnt behave like the Nazis. Their hope of immigration to Israel
and of living as Jews was their revenge. When researching this topic I was mainly focused on
acts of retributive violence and force. This quote caused me to think more about other types of
the retaliation the Jewish people might have made. Also, who what their attitudes were towards
Germans, even the ones who werent part of the holocaust.
The second generation are more anti-German. They avoid contact with Germans more
than their parents, the Holocaust survivors. They hesitate to visit Germany. This is interesting
because when I think of who would most likely want revenge I would have thought that it would
have been the people who experienced it firsthand. Instead it is more with their descendent. This
tells me that I should expand the time period and types of people I should be focusing on.