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This section expresses different emotions. Feelings of humility, powerlessness and helplessness. The feeling to be rendered helpless. For years, the tormentors could do whatever they wanted with their victims. Without any scruples they could give free reign to their aggression, their perverted sadism and their primitive bloodlust. Nobody stopped them. Day in, day out. How many times were people mocked and humiliated. How often were they exposed to hunger, thirst and cold, kicked with boots and beaten with sticks. How painful it must have been not to be able to do anything about these deprivations. That feeling, that each painful minute seems an hour, each troubling hour a day, each hungry day a week, each cold week a month, each endless month a year. The fear that this hell would never end.
Surely a million feelings of doubt, uncertainty, despondency and resignation must have come over them. Doubts about whether they would ever see their family again. Doubts whether they would survey the next day. Doubts about God and the world. Uncertainty about how long this hell would last. Would it ever end? And if so, how? The uncertainty of being able to survive this hell. Or whether they would die. And if so, when?
Despondency caused by the thought that they would have to experience all these deprivations and humiliations again every day. And resignation while thinking that there is no way to escape their fate.
But surely they also must have had feelings of revenge and retribution, in moments of anger and rage. How often did they wish to bring their tormentors to justice when they were starving and cold. How often did they wish to inflict the same pain to them, when they were beaten or kicked? Or even wished them dead, when they had to watch their family or friends being taken to the gas chambers.
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