Indifference/Hotel Rwanda Response

For this assignment, we had to write 2 paragraphs, one on how people were indifferent during the Holocaust and the other on the movie, Hotel Rwanda.

With all of the torture and deaths that was happening in the world during World War II, especially the Holocaust, many ignored these tragedies. Some may have been indifferent to the Holocaust because they didn’t care about the Jews. They must have heard what was happening to millions of Jews, but didn’t do anything about it because they just didn’t care about what happened to people they don’t like. Especially in Germany, anti-Semitism was all over the public to praise the hatred of Jews. Signs would be in windows of stores saying that Jewish people couldn’t shop there. Many made cruel jokes about them that weren’t even close to being true. In Life Is Beautiful, directed by Roberto Benigni, Guido had to have “Jewish Shop” written in front of his store. All of these factors were to show everyone’s hatred towards Jews to make them feel poorly for being Jewish and to bring others toward anti-Semitism. Since many were involved with anti-Semitism, they wouldn’t even try to care about what went on in the concentration camps, let alone to save them from their horrors. Indifference of the Holocaust also was in the hands of the Jews. Many Jews heard about the concentration camps from others would were there and knew what was going to happen. No one believed them and was considered to be insane. In Elie Wiesel’s Night, a man was taken away with others not far from town, where they were all shot. This man, Moshe the Beadle, survived this torment and announced to the town what had happened to him. He wanted to warn them that future was going to be horrific. Everybody ignored him and thought he was crazy. Little did they know when they arrived at the concentration camps that everything he said was coming true. At that time they were told what was coming for them, they couldn’t believe that people could be so inhuman. Others in the rest of the world might have also believed the same thing the Jews did, and therefore did nothing about it.

In the film, Hotel Rwanda directed by Terry George, reveals the genocide between the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda, Africa as a story that the audience would think is made up. In reality this movie is a documentary because everything that was put in this movie was very accurate as to what actually happened in 1994. Although the trauma in the movie was what many actually felt during this genocide in Rwanda, the audience watching this movie would be made to believe that it couldn’t happen. The main character, Paul who is a Hutu, tries to save many innocent Tutsis, one including his wife. He uses his hotel as a shelter for them so they won’t be killed by the Hutus. In the middle of the film, Paul once sees a large field of dead bodies covering the ground everywhere he looked. He couldn’t believe what he saw because he never expected so many Tutsis to be killed. The effect this had on Paul is almost the same effect it would have on the audience. Viewers of this film could feel bad for these people who were killed in the movie, but don’t realize that this is a piece of history and what Paul saw was probably very true in many areas of Rwanda at that time. They just think of it as exaggeration because they’ve never seen with their own eyes millions of dead people. This film overall was to show that events like this genocide can happen in the world as it was shown in the movie no matter how traumatizing it may be.