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Night really reminds me of this novel I read in 7th grade that focuses on WW2 and sheds lights on all the difficulties they faced. It showed the destruction of peoples lives that was unrepairable and ruined many lives

-Nicole Stork

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Ginger Anderson-Willis
I want to connect Night, and the way Elie Wiesel explains the roots of racism, to a video from the George Floyd Black Lives Matter protests, called “How Can We Win.” Kimberly Jones, the speaker in the video, shows a way to understand the looting and riots that happened during the protests, and how it connects to the history of economic exploitation of Black people. This is linked to Night because antisemitism is also associated with economic exploitation. When the Nazis invaded Jewish communities and forced the Jews to leave their homes and businesses, the way Elie and the Jews of Sighet had to, they took possession of all the Jews’ property and valuables. This means that it was economically advantageous for Germany to continue the persecution, deportation, and murder of Jewish people, similar to how systemic racism in America economically benefits white people. Greed and economic exploitation are part of the roots of racism, as is shown in Night, and the video, “How Can We Win.”

I included a link to the video, “How Can We Win” below. The speaker also mentions a segment from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, in which Trevor gives perspective about the protests. It is also very powerful and informative, so I linked it below as well :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4amCfVbA_c

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The Jews in Night, like blacks in To Kill A Mockingbird, are treated as lesser than the others in society. They face oppression and dehumanization because they're different which connects to EQ#1, the origins of prejudice.
- Annika Budhwani

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Incarceration of Christians and Han Chinese in Xinjiang

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Incarceration of Christians and Han Chinese in Xinjiang

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Chinese authorities are sending Christian Uighur's and member of the Han Chinese to internment camps in the northwestern region of China. They are no longer tolerating those who believe in a God, they are discriminating them for their faith, the same as in the book ¨Night¨. - Allison Maximo

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Chinese authorities are sending Christian Uyghurs and even members of the Han Chinese majority to internment camps in China's northwestern Xinjiang region, an indication that the regime's indoctrination strategy is broader than previously understood.

Most of the hundreds of thousands of people - perhaps more than a million - sent to a sprawling network of centres for political indoctrination and vocational training are Muslims, members of minority groups such as Uyghurs and Kazakhs, according to former detainees and instructors. Beijing has said the centres are being used to stamp out extremism.

But six accounts from people who have recently lived in the region or have family there - three Christian Westerners, a lawyer, a Chinese petitioner and a Uyghur family living in France - reveal that others are also being incarcerated.

'I felt like a slave:' Inside China's complex system of incarceration and control of minorities

Some are Uyghurs who have converted to Christianity. Others are Han Chinese - the ethnic group that comprises more than 90 per cent of China's population - who have challenged local authorities by petitioning for official redress, as well as people considered politically unreliable.

The reports indicate that Beijing's campaign in the region goes beyond the stated goal, published in an August white paper on Xinjiang, of countering "the breeding and spread of terrorism and religious extremism." The strategy claimed to be focused on quelling Islamic radicalization rather than a unique cultural group inside China.

But "all signs point to cultural assimilation" as the chief goal of the Chinese campaign, said Timothy Grose, a scholar at Terre Haute, Ind.'s Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology who studies Uyghur culture and is the author of an upcoming book about Uyghurs who study elsewhere in China. What is taking place in Xinjiang is an "accelerated, comprehensive and violent program to jettison meaningful markers of Uyghur identity, such as language, Islam and tangible connections to Central Asia, and replace them with elements of a Han-centric Chinese culture."

Indeed, "even secular, atheist and Christian Uyghurs are being targeted, I believe, because their milieu has still been largely shaped by Central Asian and Islamic norms."

Over the past year, Uyghurs living outside China have documented the incarceration of dozens of scholars, artists, musicians and other cultural leaders who have been taken to facilities that China calls vocational skills and training centres but which foreign critics call re-education camps.

In a July white paper, Chinese authorities directly linked Islamic belief with the spread of separatist ideology by what it called "anti-China forces attempting to split China."

But the incarceration of Christians on extremism grounds underpins an argument that Chinese authorities have used extremism as a cover to conduct a broader campaign of sinification, irrespective of religion.

"We know of at least 14 Christians" who have been taken away by authorities in Xinjiang, said Robert Paix, a Christian businessman who has lived and worked in the region, in part to share his faith. "Islam is just one of the matrix of problems the Chinese government has with Uyghur people," he said.

In Xinjiang, "any ideology which really captures someone's conscience that is other than the [Communist] Party is a threat," Mr. Paix said. "So in essence, it doesn't matter what religion it is - or even if it was a non-religious ideology."

Xinjiang is home to an estimated 11 million Uyghurs, a people whose customs, language, architecture and art are among the most distinct of the country's 55 official minorities.

One Westerner who lived in the regional capital, Urumqi, with his family described the case of a Christian Uyghur woman who lived with a Han Chinese roommate. The Uyghur woman spoke Mandarin and ran a business teaching English. But in December, 2017, police took her from her apartment, put her in a prison uniform and handed her clothes, glasses and national identification card back to her roommate, said the source, a Christian whose identity The Globe and Mail is not disclosing out of concern for the safety of the person's friends in Xinjiang.

Police said they had found questionable content on her computer, according to the source.

"The sentencing basically was very quick. From what we could understand, it was just 'You are a terrorist,' and there was a document that she had to sign - basically like a confession."

Christian Uyghurs likely number only in the thousands, according to foreigners who have lived in the region. Most Uyghurs are practising Muslims or maintain cultural ties to that faith.

But from what the Westerner could see, the incarceration of Uyghurs "did not seem religious in nature. It seemed just from our experience there that the religious extremist angle was being used to really just suppress the entire people group and culture."

Another Christian, Gulbahar Haitiwaji was incarcerated for two years, her family said. "She converted to Christianity several years ago and eschews violence," her husband, Kerim Haitiwaji, told religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter early this year. "There is no reason to imprison her. She is not a danger to China." The family has declined further public statements since Ms. Hatiwaji was released, and she is now with her husband and daughter in France.

Any responsible government must "remove the malignant tumour of terrorism and extremism" and ensure its people "enjoy a peaceful and harmonious social environment," the State Council Information Office wrote in an August white paper. It defended Xinjiang's indoctrination and training apparatus as a "deradicalization" project in line with international principles, providing free education to trainees who "have fallen under the influence and control of religious extremism."

At the same time, the construction of a system of internment centres has provided local authorities new options for punishment outside the formal legal system - even for people who are ethnic Chinese.

Authorities can send people to the centres for making statements deemed contrary to government dictates; for spreading politically unwelcome thoughts among colleagues; and for posting politically incorrect views to Chinese social-media platform WeChat, according to a lawyer who has travelled in the region and whose identity is not being disclosed because describing the camps could lead to his own incarceration.

The Globe reviewed documents collected by a Chinese human-rights activist that described the case of a Chinese man in Xinjiang who spent years fighting embezzlement charges that dated back to 2004. He disappeared last year but reappeared this spring.

"I studied for seven months," he said in a recorded interview with an activist reviewed by The Globe. "Studying" is a common word to describe time in indoctrination facilities. "There are Han people" in such centres, he added.

Gulzira Auelhan, an ethnic Kazakh and former detainee, told The Globe this year that she had seen four ethnic Chinese people in the centre where she was held.

Political enforcement has been employed against Uyghurs, too. One Uyghur woman who recently left Xinjiang described how her father-in-law had been sentenced to eight years in prison for "distributing incorrect political views." The charges were rooted in an incident that, authorities said, occurred more than two decades earlier, when he was working at a government office and complained that ethnic Chinese farmers were receiving a larger allocation of water than ethnic Uyghurs. He was held for 10 months before being tried and sentenced in a single day of court proceedings, the woman said.

The woman's identity is not being revealed because she fears retribution against members of her family still in Xinjiang. The Globe verified elements of her account with a Canadian family member and with a Western embassy that helped her leave China.

She spoke out, she said, because "I want the world to know how insane it is" for Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
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Incarceration of Christians and Han Chinese in Xinjiang shows broad reach of forced indoctrination campaign

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Chinese authorities are sending Christian Uyghurs and even members of the Han Chinese majority to internment camps in China's northwestern Xinjiang region, an indication that the regime's indoctrination strategy is broader than previously understood.

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Night really reminds me of The Book Thief, in that we are seeing the effects of WW2 and what the Nazi regime did to the Jews through a child's perspective. Although Liesel is not a Jew herself, she still understands and sees the discrimination towards the Jews, and how they are oppressed.

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It is evident throughout Night that one of the main causes of prejudice, racism, and apathy is xenophobia.  Sadly, xenophobia is still rampant in our society.  We see examples of this all over the world.  We see this in the “zero tolerance” immigration policy issued by the Trump administration which has led to more than 300 children being separated from their families and has significantly reduced the number of refugees seeking asylum being let into our country.  We see it in the Uyghur genocide and concentration/reeducation camps in China which has detained more than 1 million Uygher’s and have committed atrocities towards them including food and sleep deprivation and forced injections.  We see it manifest itself through the systemic racism in America that is evident within many classrooms, throughout the criminal justice system, and in almost every aspect of life. Xenophobia, and the racism, prejudice, and apathy it causes is present everywhere we look.  I’ve attached some sources that go into deeper detail about these topics.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/07/politics/trump-family-separation/index.html

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-muslim-children-uighur-family-separation-thought-education-a8989296.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/asia/xinjiang-explainer-intl-hnk-scli/index.html

https://now.tufts.edu/articles/long-history-xenophobia-america

-Miles Griffin

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Almost a million people in China are being brainwashed in these prison camps. Similar to the concentration camps Eli went through the Uighurs are being tortured, mistreated, and placed in very harsh conditions. Also, in both circumstances  the oppressed group is seen as inferior to the other group.
-Dillan D.
https://www.vox.com/2020/7/28/21333345/uighurs-china-internment-camps-forced-labor-xinjiang

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The similarity between the Nazis and the Taliban. People and children being taken away from families. Forced to follow rules and regulations, otherwise people will be killed.

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This movie really connects to Night because it portrays a lot of sacrifice, Indifference, and death. Both hold a lot of power and emotion within them. - Christina Overton

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Uighur detention centers in China
Many Uighur people that live in china have been separated from their families and placed in "re-education" centers. Many sources mention that the Uighur people, who are Muslim, were being forced to eat foods which are haram to them or harmful.

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Thousands of Uighur children appear to have been left without parents as their mothers or fathers were forced into Chinese internment camps, prison and other detention facilities, according to evidence from government documents in Xinjiang.

Records compiled by officials in southern Xinjiang and analysed by the researcher Adrian Zenz indicate that in 2018 more than 9,500 mostly Uighur children in Yarkand county were classified either as experiencing "single hardship" or "double hardship" depending on if one or both parents were detained.

The files, part of a cache of documents downloaded in the summer of 2019 from online networks used by local officials, showed that all the children had at least one parent in prison, detention or a "re-education" centre. No Han Chinese children were on the list.

Zenz said: "Beijing's strategy to subdue its restive minorities in Xinjiang is shifting away from internment and towards mechanisms of long-term social control. At the forefront of this effort is a battle over the hearts and minds of the next generation."

Authorities are believed to have detained more than 1 million Muslim people in re-education and other internment camps in the far north-western territory. It is part of a campaign that researchers and rights advocates say is aimed at wiping out local culture and suppressing the growth of the Uighur population. Chinese officials defend their policies in the name of poverty alleviation and counter-terrorism efforts.

Children are often placed in state orphanages or high-security boarding schools where students are closley monitored and almost all classes and interaction must be carried out in Mandarin instead of their native Uighur language.

According to Zenz's research, a total of 880,500 children - including those whose parents are absent for other reasons - were living in boarding facilities by 2019, an increase of about 76% from 2017 as China's internment system expanded.

The impact of the detentions on children and family structures is one of the less scrutinised aspects of China's increasingly criticised policies in Xinjiang. Witness accounts from those outside China have revealed what experts say is a systematic policy of separating families.

If the figures from Yarkand county were extrapolated across the region up to 250,000 Uighurs under the age of 15 may have had one or both of their parents interned, according to the Economist, which first published Zenz's findings.

Other files obtained and analysed by Zenz detailed cases of children in orphanages. One list of 85 "double hardship" students under the age of 10, whose parents were in interment centre or prison, included a one-year old living in a Yarkand orphanage. In another family, a three-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl were in an orphanage because both parents were in a "re-education" centre.

In recent years, spending on education in Xinjiang has exceeded that of security as schools emerge as a key frontline in the government's efforts to root out the possibility of dissent. Schools often feature multi-level defensive intrusion systems, full-coverage surveillance, electric fencing and computerised patrol systems.

Despite mounting criticism of alleged abuses in Xinjiang, Beijing appears to have intensified its strategy with new reports emerging of forced labour and of forced sterilisation of Uighur women.

In a speech late last month the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, said the strategy for governing the region was "absolutely correct".

"The sense of gain, happiness, and security among the people of all ethnic groups has continued to increase," he said.

In response to the report, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian called Zenz a "notorious gun for hire" for the US government.

"We have said many times that the Xinjiang issue is not a matter of human rights, ethnicity and religion, but an issue of countering violence, terrorism and separatism," he said at a regular press briefing on Friday. "This so-called suppression of Muslims and crimes against humanity is a sensational topic made up by anti-China forces for the sake of suppressing China."

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Chinese detention 'leaving thousands of Uighur children without parents'

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Thousands of Uighur children appear to have been left without parents as their mothers or fathers were forced into Chinese internment camps, prison and other detention facilities, according to evidence from government documents in Xinjiang.

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Oppression is seen everywhere not only in certain places or in a certain culture. In to kill a mockingbird, blacks are being treated unfairly and being oppressed. Not only Jews, but other cultures also face oppression.

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The movies Hotel Rwanda and Blood Diamond both had similar themes to Night in the way that there was a lot of violence and many people were treated as if they weren't human. They were also divided into groups where one was seen inferior to the other.
- Janea McVarish

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While on Instagram, I came across a post on the BLM account about how a man, Jonathan Price was killed after trying to shake a police officers hand. One of our essential questions was what are the origins of prejudice, and this is one of them. This man was killed simply because the officer was racist, and the man did nothing to deserve what happened to him, just like the Jews did not deserve what happened to them. The link below is one to an article about the situation.

Micah

https://www.foxnews.com/us/jonathan-price-police-officer-death-affidavit

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Woman in Gold is a beautiful film that portrays how the Holocaust affected people years after the actual event. The story follows Maria Altmann, an Austrian Jew who fled Vienna in the late 1930s. The movie shows how she struggles to reclaim family paintings stolen from her family during Nazi occupation through suing the Austrian government. It as a stunning reveal of how the Holocaust affects its' victims generations after the initial event. This relates to an overarching theme in Night, which is that Elie is never able to truly forget or recover from his time in the concentration camps.
-Caitlin Polesetsky

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In both The Kite Runner and Night we see people being oppressed and mistreated because they are seen different in some way.
-Sahil Sheikh

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from 1914 to 1923 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians were expelled and murdered. Because of this Genocide  many Armenian communities are scattered about across the world. I learned about this genocide in 8th grade and was also told that this genocide is why Hitler did the same to the Jews. Lastly, the Turkish government refuses to acknowledge their wrong doing - Max Salkin

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Kingdom of Armenia

The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an independent entity: At the beginning of the 4th century A.D., for instance, it became the first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion.

But for the most part, control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century, Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They permitted religious minorities to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected Armenians, whom they viewed as "infidels," to unequal and unjust treatment. Christians paid higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and had very few political or legal rights.

In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule. They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in turn grew to resent their success.

This resentment was compounded by suspicions that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they were to the Ottoman caliphate.

These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire began to crumble: At the end of the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II-obsessed with loyalty above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights-declared that he would solve the "Armenian question" once and for all.

"I will soon settle those Armenians," he told a reporter in 1890. "I will give them a box on the ear which will make them...relinquish their revolutionary ambitions."

First Armenian Massacre

Between 1894 and 1896, this "box on the ear" took the form of a state-sanctioned pogrom.

In response to large-scale protests by Armenians, Turkish military officials, soldiers and ordinary men sacked Armenian villages and cities and massacred their citizens. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.

Young Turks

In 1908, a new government came to power in Turkey. A group of reformers who called themselves the "Young Turks" overthrew Sultan Abdul Hamid and established a more modern constitutional government.

At first, the Armenians were hopeful that they would have an equal place in this new state, but they soon learned that what the nationalistic Young Turks wanted most of all was to "Turkify" the empire. According to this way of thinking, non-Turks-and especially Christian non-Turks-were a grave threat to the new state.

World War I Begins

In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared a holy war against all Christians except their allies.)

Military leaders began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians would be eager to fight for the enemy.

Indeed, as the war intensified, Armenians organized volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks in the Caucasus region. These events, and general Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people, led the Turkish government to push for the "removal" of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front.

Armenian Genocide Begins

On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began: That day, the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.

After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.

Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were shot.

At the same time, the Young Turks created a "Special Organization," which in turn organized "killing squads" or "butcher battalions" to carry out, as one officer put it, "the liquidation of the Christian elements."

These killing squads were often made up of murderers and other ex-convicts. They drowned people in rivers, threw them off cliffs, crucified them and burned them alive. In short order, the Turkish countryside was littered with Armenian corpses.

Records show that during this "Turkification" campaign, government squads also kidnapped children, converted them to Islam and gave them to Turkish families. In some places, they raped women and forced them to join Turkish "harems" or serve as slaves. Muslim families moved into the homes of deported Armenians and seized their property.

Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. In 1922, when the genocide was over, there were just 388,000 Armenians remaining in the Ottoman Empire.

Did you know? American news outlets have also been reluctant to use the word "genocide" to describe Turkey's crimes. The phrase "Armenian genocide" did not appear in The New York Times until 2004.

Aftermath and Legacy

After the Ottomans surrendered in 1918, the leaders of the Young Turks fled to Germany, which promised not to prosecute them for the genocide. (However, a group of Armenian nationalists devised a plan, known as Operation Nemesis, to track down and assassinate the leaders of the genocide.)

Ever since then, the Turkish government has denied that a genocide took place. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a necessary war measure.

Turkey is an important ally of the United States and other Western nations, and so their governments had been slow to condemn the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel voted to recognize the genocide. On October 29, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution that recognized the Armenian genocide. And on April 24, 2021, President Biden issued a statement, saying, "The American people honor all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago today."

Sources

The Armenian Genocide (1915-1916): Overview. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Armenian Genocide (1915-1923). Armenian National Institute.
Armenian Genocide. Yale University: Genocide Studies Program.

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Armenian Genocide: Facts & Timeline - HISTORY

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The Armenian genocide was the systematic killing and deportation of millions of Armenians by Ottoman Empire Turks from 1915-1920, during and after World War I.

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Gavroche from Les Miserables, and the Jewish Child

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Gavroche from Les Miserables, and the Jewish Child

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In Night we see that the SS officers, as immoral as they are feel expressively sad at the execution of the child. This reminds me a lot about a scene in the Musical Film/Musical Les Miserables where Gavroche is trying to boost moral in the revolutionaries, and when he goes beyond the barricade is shot by a french soldier and their is an instant regret in his face. This also connects to how empathy is a seed of social action because after Gavroche's death the revolutionaries are unified and continue fighting. The Jews do not have as many resources but they do express a unity and reverence for what had just happened.

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The Book Thief, mostly relates to humans having the capacity to be resilient and compassionate. Throughout the novel, the characters are faced with incredible obstacles that they manage to overcome.- Valerie Laguna

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This movie portrays the indifference shown towards the people who have to dig up the diamonds. They are seen as indifferent by the people who are selling the diamonds to larger brands.
-Mina Ghobrial

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Tv show Holocaust. The show follows two families while the holocaust unfolds. What resonated with me was how personal the holocaust felt after getting to care about the people in the show. It added a nice personal touch to my perspective on the holocaust.

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In this war Azerbaijan is the oppressor and has way more power than Armenia and has cost the lives of thousands of people. This war shows the prevalent issue of indifference that the world shows to mass killings and genocides like the Holocaust. It is absolutely heartbreaking that the U.S. and many other powerful countries are sitting around and watching this happen rather than helping put an end to this war of aggression. It is even sadder to know that Israeli is supplying the already powerful Azerbaijan with more weapons which is a sign of indifference and ignorance, Just like some of America's largest corporations continued to do business with Hitler's Germany until 1942. We have all seen this injustice and how history has played out due to our indifference; yet we still do the same, continuing the cycle of indifference, dehumanization, and injustices. - Diana Chavez
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-i-m-jewish-and-armenian-israeli-weapons-are-killing-my-people-1.9229817

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/13/fighting-in-nagorno-karabakh-spills-into-day-17-live-news

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It's very similar in the standpoint of the oppression, the black people not being treated fairly even though at a point it seems like they might, yet readers always know they won't.
-Jones Hodur

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The black people in TKAM are similar to the Jews in Night, as they are not given a fair trial by their oppressors.
-TJ Lezcano

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The Kite Runner had a similar element of the story where there was a large vicious group in power that was able to treat others in terrible ways. In Night, it's the Nazis, and in The Kite Runner, it's the Taliban.

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The film The Killing Fields shows that racism, prejudice and hatred leads to dehumanization and mass death continued into current times. The film is about the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and their genocide against their own Cambodian people. The world stood by and did next to nothing, while millions were killed. Even when Vietnam finally invaded, after having been attacked by the Khmer Rouge, the United States and many others condemned them. The West was more concerned that the Vietnamese were spreading communism than that they would be stopping a genocide.
-Kira Macdonald

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Night and Hotel Rwanda share the same theme of death and inequality. They both contain a lot of death, and a lot of people that are treated like animals. Also, both have separate groups, and both have one group that is picked on.
-Aaron Cayetano

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Article: First They Came: The Poem of the Protest 

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Article: First They Came: The Poem of the Protest 

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One of the most striking elements of the protests taking place around the country this week have been the signs-signs that warn, signs that rage, signs that joke, signs that manage, wittily, to do a little of each. Whether scrolled on the sides of old Amazon boxes or painted in primary colors on brand-new poster board, signs, as tools of protest, function as visual voices: Shared on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, and captured by professional photographers who send the images to the wire services, they translate the hums of the throngs into language. On Saturday, and again on Sunday, as crowds gathered to protest President Donald Trump's executive order restricting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, signs once again served as speech. Some of the most common read "NO BAN, NO WALL." Some insisted that "IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA GREAT." Some noted that "JESUS WAS A REFUGEE."

Many others, however, quoted the words of a familiar poem-an idea coined by the Lutheran pastor and theologian, Martin Niemöller, in the years following World War II. "FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE MUSLIMS," the signs start. They add a new ending to the well-worn lines: "AND WE SAID 'NOT TODAY.'"

The specific words of the saying the signs borrowed from vary; the most commonly cited version of Niemöller's pseudo-poem, however-the one quoted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as a lyrical manifestation of the evils of political apathy-reads like this:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out- Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.
It is a reference to the Holocaust. It is also, however, a warning about the ease with which such an event could occur again, if we of the present allow ourselves to become ignorant of the lessons of the past. Niemöller, born in 1892, was German, and a Protestant. Initially a supporter of Hitler's rise to power, Niemöller came to oppose him in the years leading up to the war: In 1933, he became the head of a group of opposition clergy members, the Pfarrernotbund, or the Pastors' Emergency League. For that, in 1937, he was arrested and sent to the concentration camps-first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau. He survived until the end of the war, when the Allies liberated him and his fellow prisoners. Niemöller returned, after that, to the clergy-and he focused, for the rest of his life, on reconciliation as both a political and a theological aspiration. "First They Came" emerged from that effort.
They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.
Niemöller himself resisted the notion that the lines constitute a poem; instead, he said, their ideas came gradually, and organically, through a series of speeches he delivered after the war. One scholar, UC Santa Barbara's Harold Marcuse, who has studied Niemöller's diaries, suggests that "First They Came" might have crystallized during a visit Niemöller took to Dachau in November of 1945, mere months after his liberation from the camp. The quotation itself, as it's used today, Marcuse notes, "most likely emerged in 1946, and it definitely took on the well-known poetic form by the early 1950s."

And it quickly became popular, from there, as a lyrical argument for civil rights and collective action-and, more broadly, for simple empathy. The quote was that rarest of things: a political argument grounded in religious tradition. As Niemöller explained of the origin of the lines, in 1976 [translated from the German]:

There were no minutes or copy of what I said, and it may be that I formulated it differently. But the idea was anyhow: The communists, we still let that happen calmly; and the trade unions, we also let that happen; and we even let the Social Democrats happen. All of that was not our affair. The Church did not concern itself with politics at all at that time, and it shouldn't have anything do with them either. In the Confessing Church we didn't want to represent any political resistance per se, but we wanted to determine for the Church that that was not right, and that it should not become right in the Church ....

In 1933, Niemöller added, he and his fellow clergy members included in the founding documents of the Pfarrernotbund the idea that any action made against a minister of Jewish heritage would be considered an action against the collective. As he put it: "That was probably the first anti-antisemitic pronouncement coming from the Protestant Church."

What gives "First They Came" such resonance today, though, isn't merely its warnings about the dangers of apathy or its recognition of what would later be dubbed " normality creep" or, indeed, its lesson on the ease through which the privileged can become the oppressed. The lines' elegant structure also encourages-indeed, demands-a subjective interpretation. "First They Came" is uniquely malleable: a 20th-century poem that reads as almost tailor-made for the remix culture of the 21st. It features an almost fill-in-the-blank format, suggesting both hyper-personalization and omni-relevance. It is no surprise, in that sense, that its structure has been adopted by everyone from Angela Davis (" If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you in the night") to union activists (" First they came for McDonald's..." *.

"First They Came," in other words, is particularly attuned to the needs of the modern protest: It offers wisdom about the evils of the past, in an attempt to prevent more evils of the future. To use its language is to claim an understanding of history-and an understanding, too, of how readily its mistakes can be repeated by those who fall victim to the luxuries of forgetfulness. It is #neveragain, and #neverforget, with the subjects added in. It is a poem made powerful by its pronouns: They-I-I, They-I-I, They-I-I, They-no one-me.

Harold Marcuse, for his part, warns that remix was likely not Niemöller's intention when he used his warnings as a refrain. "Niemöller's original argument was premised on naming groups he and his audience would instinctively not care about," Marcuse writes. "When his poem is invoked today it is usuallyto add one's own group to the list of persecuted. That was not a meaning that Niemöller ever wished to convey." It's an objection, however, that could prove the rule: "First They Came," as used today, derives its power from the notion that no one should be instinctively not cared about-that everyone is deserving of attention and, indeed, protection. That is the nature of politics, and of compassion. And it is to our peril, the poem suggests, that we forget how wound and woven we all are, in the end. They-I-me: The great promise-and the great threat-is, the poem warns, that they will prove to be the same.
*This article originally attributed the "if they come" quote to James Baldwin, based on his letter to Angela Davis. Baldwin was referring in that letter, however, to a line Davis originated. We regret the error.

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'First They Came': The Poem of the Protests

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One of the most striking elements of the protests taking place around the country this week have been the signs-signs that warn, signs that rage, signs that joke, signs that manage, wittily, to do a little of each.