Escaping Your Morals essays

Escaping Your Morals essays Being put in a life or death situation might be everybodys worst fear. Youre having a nightmare that you are burning alive eighty stories up, and youre only choice to ease the pain is to jump. Or you are faced with a choice that you can do something against your morals, or die. Rarely do we experience these situations in real life; its only something we can derive from television, or pull out of a book. Benjamin Jacobs lived his nightmare. He lived our nightmare. He was put in a life or death situation, not for a day, but for four years and two months. Being put in a situation such as that, one faces decisions, things he or she could do to live, or die. Benjamin Jacobs is a Holocaust survivor. He was placed in a concentration camp with his father and they were both sent to work. In the concentration camps, you either work, or die, and working was the medicine to cure immanent death. During a roll call at Jacobs first concentration camp, Steineck, the SS officers asked for all doctors, tailors, and cooks to step forward (Jacobs). They did so, but Jacobs, with dentistry training, was reluctant to step forward. After his father urged him to do so, he complied and was assigned to be the camp dentist. The choice that Jacobs made there was to abandon his father. To some, this may sound terrible, but when both Jacobs and his father knew that he would have a better chance to live through this hell being in a non-expendable position, I think that his actions were justified. Jacobs still had so much to live for, whereas his father had lived his life. As horrible as it sounds, I can understand why Jacobs father urged him to go. It s a parents instinct to put their children after themselves. Even at that, Jacobs had a hard time deciding whether or not to leave. He had a moral battle going on through his head, he could stay and protect and watch over his father, or he could go a...