anybody. He witnesses a young girl getting shot by a SS officer for running around, he witness a lady getting whipped for trying to pick something up, and he was whipped because he was hiding. Tadek knew that if he did not continue to follow the orders of cleaning out the trains, then he would have been punish because of not following the orders. Living under prison is emotional, however, how would it feel if you were living in hidden for years, constantly afraid of what is to come next, and what would occur if you were discovered by the Nazi Party.
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Franks is a firsthand account of living under constant fear of being discovered and sent to prison. Anne Frank describes the conditions she and the other family were living in on a daily basis until the time where she was discovered and subsequently sent to different concentrations camps. What could have driven the German people to accept a radical ideology that resulted in people to run away and live in hiding for most of their life?
In one of the statements that Anne Frank wrote she said, “All college students are being asked to sign an official statements to the effect that they sympathized with the Germans and approve of the New Order” (Frank, p. 120). This means that anybody, no matter what they believed in, was forced to sign and agree to the Nazi Party’s ideology. Anybody who disagrees and refused to accept their ideology would be subsequently sent to a German labor camp, where living conditions were unbearable and would eventually result in death.
What would occur to the German people if they disagree to this order? Some people in Germany must have opposed the idea of the Nazi Party. But what occurred is that they were given a choice, they could both sign and agree to what the Nazi Party believed in, or they could not have sign and not agree to what the Nazi Party. But in situations where somebody refuses to sign, then what would eventually come next was imprisonment and hard labor. This will eventually result in them dying because of the horrible conditions the prisoners needed to face in the camps.
The SS officers were brutal and they were not afraid of handing out punishments towards any prisoners at the time. The smallest thing that the prisoners do that annoy the SS officers would result in them being killed or whipped as Tadek saw and experienced while on the ramps of the camp. People were scared with disagreeing with the Nazi Party because they wanted to live and had a will to survival. The camp workers must have known that what they were doing was wrong, but they had no other choice if they wanted to continue to live.
They needed to place aside with what they believed in was right, and subsequently just agree to what they were told to do and believe in. What could be another reason for people to agree to a certain belief, the “Stockholm syndrome” could be another reason. The Stockholm syndrome is defined as, “A term to describe the positive bond kidnap victim develops towards their captor” (Namnyak, p. 4). This means that the victim of a kidnapping would then at the end help and take part of the kidnappers plans because of how they had been treated and what they had been told.
Take for example a victim that has been kidnapped. That kidnapped victim would then be pampered with gifts and other items for a certain period of time, while at the same the captor would try and persuade the victim into believing that what they are doing is good and that the captor has a good character. This would eventually lead to the kidnapped victim into becoming affiliated with the crimes that the captor may continue to do. However, all this was occurring under and constant fear of being placed in isolation.
This could mean that any victims who were suffering from the “Stockholm syndrome” must have been scared. The victims were force to committed crimes against other people because they were afraid of the consequences that might follow if they did not do what was told of them to do. They could continue to accept the gifts and continue to think that their captor has a good character, but the truth is that the victim must have still known that what they were doing was wrong. They only continue to commit the crimes because they were threatened to do so.
They were victims at the end, this means that the captors could do whatever they wanted with the victim, which included killing them. They were only following the orders of the captors not because they sympathized with them, but because they were afraid of what was to come if they did not agree with them. In the end, Tadek faced an emotional roller coaster. He wanted to continue to do the right thing and treat other humans with respect and dignity, however, he knew that if he did that, then he was subsequently going to be punished because he knew that the SS soldiers were not afraid of handing down punishments.
Tadek and other prisoners must have been scared to disagree with the Nazi Party because they knew that if they disagree with them, then they would be sent to a camp, put to death, tortured, or they could be part of a medical experiment. None of these people wanted to experience these things, this resulted in them agreeing with what was told them to do because they had the will to survive. However, what else could have caused the rise of the popularity of the Nazi’s even if they popularity was not genuine?