Post 2 Amanda Stallard

The human will to survive is innate and motivates us to make choices throughout our lives that will ensure our ability to survive. The battle between life and death is something all of us face everyday by making simple choices such as looking both ways before crossing the road or wearing a seat belt.  The choices that we make about survival in modern day society are relativity simple and cause minimal stress but what if the choice of living or dying was not that simple? This question sparked a thought about what it would have been like to experience the Holocaust and to face the impossible choice over life and death.

In our current day society it is hard to imagine that the Holocaust actually occurred. I think that no one could every know what it was like unless they experienced the horrors and reality of the Holocaust first hand.  The survivors and victims of the Holocaust were faced with what is called a, “choiceless choice.”  The choiceless choice means that there is no right choice because either way the outcome is undesirable.   

The many victims and survivors of the Holocaust were faced with the choiceless choice to either work for the enemy or against the enemy.  This choice determined wither you would live or die.  The impossible decision to work for the enemy meant that you had to kill your own people while the alternative was dying with your people.  This hopeless decision left many feeling guilt over wanting to survive. In contrast many Holocaust victims welcomed death because it was better then the hell on earth that they were experiencing.  

We can only produce in our imagination what we would do in the situation of being faced with life and death.  The choices that we make in life greatly contribute to our likelihood of surviving but sometimes we have no control over life and death.  We all have different things in our life that motivate us to keep living or not living.  My motivation in life is my family and to most people this is the same motivating factor. The will to live is strong in some individuals and weak in others due to the value that we place on our life and the people in it.