Essay One
This essay asks you to incorporate the readings, oral testimonies, and discussion from the first three units to allow you to grapple with the motivations behind rescue and some of the ways Jews sought out gentile assistance as well as the ways scholars have sought to understand and characterize these actions. Please write a short essay in response to the prompt below. This essay will be 3-4 pages in length, double-spaced, one-inch margins, with 12 point font. Please use CMS for citation.
Prompt #1 The reading for this unit has been interdisciplinary. You have read selections from a sociologist (Tec), a psychologist (Fogelman), an anthropologist (Paxson), a scholar of French and French literature (Henry), and engaged with the primary sources in the Grynberg work "read" the USC Shoah Foundation testimonies. The act of providing rescue or aid during the Holocaust meant risking serious consequences (that varied depending on where the aid happened) and a major theme in scholarship for multiple disciplines has been attempting to understand the motivations of the rescuers/ aid providers. The reading you have engaged with has asked what motivated gentiles to take such risks and rescue or assist Jews? Are there certain personalities/ socioeconomic backgrounds/ political beliefs/ religious beliefs that make a gentile more predisposed to taking such risks? Please write a response essay discussing scholarly attempts to categorize or understand rescue/ assistance motivation and how valuable/ effective you feel these various efforts are. Be sure to use supporting evidence from the sources we used in class.