True Fear

Often the fear of pain and loss can be much worse than the actual pain. In many instances in my life, I have been scared of a punishment or maybe a test result that ended up not being too bad at all, and I can think of times where the anticipation of pain has been worse then the actual pain, like getting shots or ripping off a bandage. Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish prisoners were subjected to incredible amounts of pain and torture, but another terrible part of what they felt was their fear that they would die in these concentration camps. While they tried to stay strong, sometimes this fear ended up breaking them, like when Felix found out he would likely die, and "All night he cried and screamed" (Spiegelman 59). I'm not trying to make the point that the fear of death or miserable torture is unreasonable, but rather that if I can feel so scared of something so trivial, it is impossible to imagine the fear and despair that the prisoners in Auschwitz felt during this time. From my perspective, this seems to explain why the horror of the Holocaust cannot truly be shown by words or pictures. While people can imagine the pain of the victims, and sympathize with them, in the end they're just reading another story, and can put it down whenever they like. We cannot really understand the suffering because we cannot experience this constant fear that today may be our last day, and that we will never see our family or loved ones again.