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“I am haunted by humans” (Zusak 550). The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is about the horrors of World War II. Liesel and her family help out an old friend by hiding a Jew. Liesel also steals her first book when she at her brother’s funeral. Liesel Meminger’s remarkable actions like feeling good when she steals a book and her family hiding a Jew help demonstrate why Death is “haunted by humans”. Stealing books is not right but it is also unusual. Stealing books in Nazi Germany is unusual. Stealing is illegal which could cause Death to be haunted by humans. “Liesel stood in the mayor’s library with greed in her fingers and book titles at her lips” (Zusak 365). When Liesel is trying to find a book to steal in the mayor’s library, she gets the feeling …show more content…
Liesel and her family were paying an old friend of Hans but also doing something that they knew they could be taken away for. “We can’t leave him here, the smell will kill us…and we can’t carry him out the door and drag him up the street either” (Zusak 329). Max, the Jew had become sick and they were not sure if he was going to make it. Trying to figure out a way to take out a Jewish corpse had become impossible to do without getting caught. “Does he know? Liesel thought. Can he smell we’re hiding a Jew” (Zusak 343)? Having Nazi soldiers come into their home was nerve racking because they had to hide Max but they had less than a minute. They were so worried that they might get caught because they could have been taken away from their house and their family. Hiding a Jew could scare anybody if they were not allowed to. Liesel Meminger’s remarkable actions like feeling good when she steals a book and her family hiding a Jew help demonstrate why Death is “haunted by humans”. Stealing books and hiding a Jew were both wrong things to do because they were not allowed. These two things are just a few of the ways Death could have become haunted by
Markus Zusak’s novel The Book Thief depicts the life of a certain young German girl named Liesel Meminger during World War II. Her story was told through the eyes of Death, who narrates both the blessings and devastation that occurred during that era. Liesel experiences living with her new foster parents and come across a boy named Rudy Steider who will later on become her best friend. As the story unfolds, Liesel gradually discovers the horrifying truth behind the Nazi regime as her foster parents take refuge of a Jewish man. Despite being in the midst of destruction and recently coping from her traumatic background, she undertakes on a journey of self-discovery and
In The Book Thief, author Markus Zusak tells the tragic story of Liesel Meminger and her experiences in 1939 Nazi Germany. Zuzak incorporates compelling literary devices such as toe curling foreshadowing, personification, and vivid imagery in the form of simile and metaphors to grasp the readers’ interest. Zusak’s use of various literary devices helps to deepen the text and morals of the story, and makes the dramatic historical novel nearly impossible to put down.
In the novel The Book Thief by Markus Zusak the narrator is Death, who shows itself as sympathetic and sensitive towards the suffering of the world and the cruel human nature, through its eyes, we can get to know the heartbreaking story of Liesel Meminger an ordinary, but very lucky nine-year old German girl; living in the midst of World War II in Germany. In this book the author provides a different insight and observation about humanity during this time period from a German view and not an Allied perspective, as we are used to.
In this essay I will talk about The Book Thief Characters. The characters are Liesel, Rudy, And Max. I Will talk about how they are Influenced by society in This Book/Movie. I am going to three Paragraphs about these three characters. This essay is going to be a Compare and Contrast Essay.
In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Liesel Meminger, an orphaned little girl living in Nazi Germany, evolves partly through her numerous literary thefts. At her younger brother’s gravesite, she steals her first book, The Grave Digger’s Handbook, which teaches her not only the method to physically bury her brother, but also lets her emotionally bury him and move on. The theft of her next book, The Shoulder Shrug, from a book burning marks the start of Liesel’s awareness and resistance to the Nazi regime. As a story with a Jewish protagonist “who [is] tired of letting life pass him by – what he refer[s] to as the shrugging of the shoulders to the problems and pleasures of a person’s time on earth,” this novel prepares her both for resisting the
Guilt is a prevalent theme throughout The Book Thief. Liesel endures guilt multiple times, when she steals laundry money from Rosa, gets Max sick, verbally attacks Ilsa Hermann, and experiences the guilt of surviving. All of these acts caused Liesel to experience some sort of guilt which later causes her to perform questionable tasks.
The chaos and destruction that the Nazi’s are causing are not changing the lives of only Jews, but also the lives of citizens in other countries. Between Night by Elie Wiesel and The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom, comradeship, faith, strength, and people of visions are crucial to the survival of principle characters. Ironically, in both stories there is a foreseen future, that both seemed to be ignored.
The heavily proclaimed novel “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak is a great story that can help you understand what living in Nazi Germany was like. Throughout the story, the main character, Liesel goes through many hardships to cope with a new life in a new town and to come to the recognition of what the Nazi party is. Liesel was given up for adoption after her mother gave her away to a new family, who seemed harsh at first, but ended up being the people who taught her all the things she needed to know. Life with the new family didn’t start off good, but the came to love them and her new friend, Rudy. As the book carried along, it was revealed that the Hubermanns were not Nazi supporters, and even took in a Jew and hid him in their basement later on in the book. Liesel became great friends with the Jew living in her basement, Max, who shared many similarities which helped form their relationship. Both of
The Death the reader befriends in The Book Thief is far from the Death s/he previously feared to see standing over him or her in the twilight hours of life. We are haunted by him and him by us. As a group, we form the opposite ends of a spectrum: A species with the infinite ability to love and hate, create and destroy, burn and build, and the eternal metaphysical being who must witness the entire process, never truly being able to grasp what it means to live, but ever loving those who do.
The story begins with Liesel, her mother, and her brother, Werner, riding on a train. Werner dies and Liesel and her mother step off to bury him. At the funeral one of the grave diggers drops a book. Liesel
In The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, beauty and brutality is seen in many of the characters. Rudy, Liesel, and Rosa display examples of beauty and brutality often without realizing what exactly they are doing, because it is a part of their human nature. Zusak not only uses his characters, but also the setting of the novel in Nazi Germany to allude to his theme of the beauty and brutality of human nature. The time in which the novel is set, during World War II, displays great examples of beauty and brutality, such as the mistreatment of the Jews. As a result of this time period, the characters have to go through troubling times, which reveals their beautiful and brutal nature in certain circumstances. Zusak uses his characters and their experiences to demonstrate the theme of the beauty and brutality of human nature in the novel.
The Holocaust is marked as one of the most horrifying events of the 20th century.The person who was responsible for the Holocaust was Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party. The question is, how, and why was Hitler able to do this? The actual truth behind all this is that, Hitler could make the world his, just by using words. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, it tells a story about a young girl growing up when Nazi Germany was invincible. The author explores some very meaningful, yet, controversial themes for the most part of the novel. Out of all themes, he believes that words hold a remarkable power. He explores how words manipulate, divide, and connect people.
Even though Liesel is just a kid and is going through some tough times, it still doesn’t give her the right to steal. Besides, Death claims that you could argue that others have it harder during this time and I agree. If you were a Jew during this time, that was bad news. They were persecuted, hunted, and killed by the Nazis. Liesel, on the other hand, although have lost her brother and may never see her mother again, is not living in constant fear for her life. The novel even states, “anything is better than being a Jew.” (Zusak
Death states that, “I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both” (Zusak 491). This book shows us human doing things that weren’t even imaginable before this point. Many people give into ideas that were lies. But, we also watch a few people go out of their way and sacrifice everything for a man they barely even know. They do everything they can to keep him safe and alive. They work harder, the get another job, and they even steal. In Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, death examines the ugliness and the beauty of humans.
In the book The Reader by Bernhard Schlink, the author offers a point of view on what it was like in the minds of the generations of people in Germany after the Holocaust. As many young people tried to distance themselves from their older relatives in order avoid the guilt and the shame that came with being a part of the family, this novel highlights the reality of the situation of the younger generation: no German could escape the true guilt that came with loving people who committed such monstrosities against a seemingly innocent group of people. I wanted to read a book that was very different and more unique than those of which I have read, and this book was exactly that. After four days, I had finished the 218 pages of The Reader, and during