World War II's Impact On Civilians

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my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust." He continues his depressing and heartbreaking narrative with, "Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever." As a result of his experiences, Elie does not celebrate either Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, and becomes bitter and disillusioned with God.
War can strip away the most basic of human kindnesses and compassions from its civilian casualties, and reduces life to a simple struggle for survival. In a telling scene in a railway caravan to Auschwitz, Wiesel tells the story of prisoner mistreatment of Madame Schaechter. The silence of the railcar is disturbed by Madame Schaechter's loud, hysterical shrieks, causing the other inhabitants to take any means to quiet her. Her shrieks make the fellow prisoners fear for their fate, and several young males desperate to silence her hit her repeatedly about the face. Notes Wiesel, "The heat, the thirst, the pestilential stench, the suffocating lack of air

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Hugo Black's Majority Opinion in Korematsu vs the United States, 1944).
War can play havoc with the very desire to live. In his book, Night, Elie Wiesel notes the profound effect of being forced to watch the death of his family in a Nazi death camp. Wiesel spent time at both Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel notes, "Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live."
The immediate psychological trauma of war on the civilian population is very real. In Hiroshima, Hersey describes some events that occurred to Mr. Tanimoto immediately after the bomb was dropped. Writes Hersey, "He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but ...

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