Anne Frank wrote ¨most people are good.¨ I agree but disagree because in MY opinion all people have some good in them. Yes they might grow up and become evil, but everyone is born good. Innocent, good people die every day. There are bad people; I'm not saying there isn't just not enough to overpower the good. As Anne Frank wrote in her diary ¨most people are good.¨ For example people during the Holocaust helped the Jews and the people in the ghettos. People during the war would hide small children, sneak things they needed into the ghettos. This means they were kind hearted and cared about their friends enough to risk their lives or just had that good will to help people as much as they could, even if it did mean risking their lives. In The Pianist a Jewish policeman saved Wladyslaw Szpilman, from going to a death camp. Another example is from ¨A Survivor Remembers.¨ A German officer helped three ill girls survive including Gerda Weissman, who luckily survived and married her liberator. This shows how people even doing wrong are good, because everyone is born good.
It's comforting to know that even in the darkest times there were still people willing to help those in need (Righteous Gentiles). The stories of these Righteous Gentiles are sometimes just as powerful as those of the actual victims. They show the side of the common person, and whether they had the courage to stand up for what was right or not.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting topic to me, because no matter your answer-there is always something or someone that can disprove it. We talked about this in my Global class earlier in the semester and I found (after listening to multiple sides and different forms of evidence) that while all people are good, all good people can also do wrong. I don't know if you've studied the Nuremberg trials yet, but you will find that a major defense of the Nazis was: "I was just following orders,". To the people who conformed to Nazism, it was the right thing to do to hate Jews. And while that is awful, it really makes you think that they were doing whatever twisted actions it took to do what they thought good was. So, while by our standards, the Nazis were horrible, they were doing what they thought was good. To them, Nazism is good. To you I pose the question: how do we really know what good is?
ReplyDeleteI guess you can't really know what is good and what is bad because as seen in a different perspective it might have been the right or good choice to make, like you said before to the Nazi's hating the Jews was right, but to us it is not.
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