Academic Papers

Death and Suicide (Comp 1)

Author's Note: There are a lot of weird things going on in this paper (bolded quotes, underlined author name, etc).  Just ignore it. It's due to the instructor's requirements. I just haven't been bothered to go and change it all into a normal presentation.

Introduction

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel is about her experience of surviving the Holocaust. The first thing Lengyel says is how guilty she feels. Lengyel states she feels she could have saved her family. Lengyel recalls being terrified for her husband when he was arrested; she rushed her family to the train station where he was going to be. Lengyel reveals the horrors of 96 people being forced into the cattle cars, how fear and uncertainty ate at them. Lengyel describes the cattle cars as if "the atmosphere was poisoned" (17) due to fights and hysteria from people being terrified. Death and suicide were also common on the cattle cars. Lengyel says that "the S.S. would neither let us bury nor remove [the dead]. We had to live with our corpses" (19). This paper will analyze how Buddhism, Wicca, and Atheism look at death and suicide.

Summary

Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel is about Lengyel's experience during the Holocaust. Lengyel was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where she fought to survive. Lengyel had been propositioned to exchange sex for food, which she denied. Once the S.S. in command allowed for a make-shift clinic to be made; Lengyel was one of only a few women allowed to work in the clinic. Lengyel speaks of various cases she tended to and how disease ran rampant among the inmates. After a while of working within the clinic, Lengyel had given up hope of living long enough to be rescued from the camps, someone inspired her to be a part of the underground rebellion and to keep living. She joined and vowed to never let the world forget what happened in the death camps.

Buddhism

First, what is Buddhism? It was started by Siddhartha Gautama. Gautama was a war lord's son who enjoyed the pleasures only a prince could have ("Basics of Buddhism"). Gautama became bored of these pleasures and ventured out into the world. Upon witnessing the horrors of the world, Gautama relinquished his title and to take on another role: a monk. He wanted to understand the truth of the world and stripped himself of possessions in hopes of achieving that understanding. It was not until he meditated that Gautama found the way to be free from suffering and was then known as Buddha: the Enlightened One. Buddhism is about becoming enlightened, which ends suffering and takes people away from the cycle of birth and rebirth. Buddhists follow all of the Four Noble Truths.

Buddhists live by the Four Noble Truths. "Basics of Buddhism" says the Four Noble Truths are "suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end." Buddhists believe that by following the Four Noble Truths that suffering can be eliminated. Buddhists also believe in rebirth and karma. People gain good karma by simply not doing anything bad or by actively doing good things. People gather bad karma by doing bad things such as killing, stealing, and lying. In the concentration camps if people were caught doing something wrong, they got punished. Lengyel says that during the roll calls "when we were accused of some infraction of the rules we had to go down on our knees and wait in the mud and dirt" (47). It is usually thought that negative actions receive negative reactions. Buddhists gain Neutral karma by natural necessities such as breathing or sleeping. Karma effects how Buddhists are reborn.

In Buddhism, people are reborn into one of six planes: three are good and the other three bad. People are reborn into the plane that is determined by their karma. If people have good karma, they are reborn as a human, god, or demigod. Being reborn as a human is considered the highest plane of rebirth, because humans do not have to deal with the constant conflict the gods and demigods suffer from. If people have bad karma, they are assigned the planes of animals, ghosts, or hell. Lengyel describes Birkenau as a room to hell. She says that the camp "was only the antechamber to Hell" (116). Hell is said to have untold suffering. There is far more suffering than that of a man. Buddhists believe that there is no escape from suffering.