The analyses and narratives presented in the three books suggest very strongly that modes of survival, resistance and rescue were possible during the Holocaust. Without question, instances of the failure of these modes of behavior likely outweigh instances of their success. Nonetheless, the text establishes that such activities were possible and practiced regularly throughout the Holocaust.
The Holocaust examines the Holocaust through the essays of numerous scholars and other writers. Though authors in the book disagree as to the true philosophical causes of the Holocaust û was it the desire to eradicate all undesirable genetic elements or only the Jews û none disagree that the impetus for the slaughter of so many Jews was a desire to eradicate them from society. For example, in his essay titled "Holocaust: Genocide of the Jews," Donald Niewyk documents the Nazi's plan for extermination of the Jews. Survival of the Holocaust, therefore, by its very nature was an act of resistance. Survival, therefore, was not impossible because, clearly, as Niewyk notes, some 200,000 people survived the concentration camps ("The Genocide" 129). How they survived, however, and what forms of resistance they employed, if any, to ensure their survival remains a matter of debate, as demonstrated by the differing opinions espoused by the authors in Niewyk's book.
Bruno Bettelheim writes that survival was possible, but only through lack of resistance. He argues that the longer prisoners remained in the concentration camps, the more childlike they became, and the more they imitated the behavior of the Nazi officers. Hd contends that they so imitated the officers that they turned against other concentration camp survivors who were weaker or newer to camp than themselves and who, therefore, threatened the older camp survivors' lives by possibly drawing the officers' anger (Bettelheim 111).
Philosophically, one could argue that this was an act of res...