Red Sector A

The Holocaust has been the subject of many songs in mainstream culture. Often, the references to the Holocaust are not stated explicitly but depend on the listener to actually understand and consider the lyrics. Watch the following video and then read the lyrics to Red Sector A by the Canadian prog-rock band, Rush. Then, read the short piece and answer the questions.



Red Sector A:
All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves
Is stay alive...

Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
Shouting guards and smoking guns
Will cut down the unlucky ones

I clutch the wire fence
Until my fingers bleed
A wound that will not heal-
A heart that cannot feel-
Hoping that the horror will recede
Hoping that tomorrow-We'll all be freed

Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger-too weak to cry

I hear the sound of gunfire
At the prison gate
Are the liberators here-
Do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother-it's too late
But I must help my mother
Stand up straight...

Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings
To survive?...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sector_A]
Rush's 1984 album "Grace Under Pressure" included the track "Red Sector A." The song, written by drummer Neal Peart, focuses on the experience of a person struggling to survive at an unnamed prison camp. "Red Sector A" was particularly meaningful to the band's lead singer/bassist/keyboardist Geddy Lee:From "How the Holocaust rocked Rush front man Geddy Lee", Jewish News Weekly, June 25, 2004:

The seeds for the song were planted nearly 60 years ago in April 1945 when British soldiers liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Lee’s mother, Manya (now Mary) Rubenstein, was among the survivors. (His father, Morris Weinrib, was liberated from Dachau a few weeks later.) The whole album “Grace Under Pressure,” says Lee, who was born Gary Lee Weinrib, “is about being on the brink and having the courage and strength to survive.”
Though “Red Sector A,” like much of the album from which it comes, is set in a bleak, apocalyptic future, what Lee calls “the psychology” of the song comes directly from a story his mother told him about the day she was liberated.
“I once asked my mother her first thoughts upon being liberated,” Lee says during a phone conversation. “She didn’t believe [liberation] was possible. She didn’t believe that if there was a society outside the camp how they could allow this to exist, so she believed society was done in.”

1. What motivated Rush to write Red Sector A?
2. According to the lyrics, what impact did the camp have on its captives physically and mentally?
3. In the song, what hope surfaces for the camp's captives?
4. According to the final lines of the song, what are the captives left thinking and feeling after being freed?

Orders and Initiatives

Orders, rules and laws have important places in society. Most regulations exist to ensure the safety of citizens within a community and make sense from a common sense or moral point of view. We have been conditioned to follow orders, based on those laws, given by people in authority. When a police officer arrives at the scene of a crime or an accident, we follow the orders because, we assume, the situation is going to be taken care of. When a soldier is given an order from a commanding officer, those orders are normally followed without question. When the officials giving those orders have questionable motives though, can we trust the orders that they give and the laws that they make?
We learn that it was actually a small but influential group of Nazi leadership - Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich - that made the secret plans to annihilate the Jews. At the Wansee Conference in 1942, the "Final Solution" was agreed upon. The poisonous gas, Zyklon B would be used in order to exterminate large numbers of people in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and the other death camps. In order to do so, a vast number of people had to either follow orders or turn a blind eye to what was going on. Murder on such a vast scale simply could not happen unnoticed.

What are alternative actions can one take if one feels that an order is morally wrong?
What are some consequences if people do—or do not do—as they are ordered?
Professor Kissi has talked about "respecting authority but questioning information." Give an example where one could "respect authority" but "question information."