An estimated six million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust, and many were thought to have survived due to chance. Vladek in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, Maus, is one of the few Jewish people to survive the Holocaust. Though Vladek’s luck was an essential factor, his resourcefulness and quick-thinking were the key to his survival. Vladek’s ability to save for the times ahead, to find employment, and to negotiate, all resulted in the Vladek’s remarkable survival of the Holocaust. Therefore, people who survived the Holocaust were primarily the resourceful ones, not the ones who were chosen at random. Granted luck did play a part in the novel, the major factors that kept Vladek alive were his resourcefulness and quick-thinking. Specifically, his ability to save items for the times to come. When Vladek was in an overcrowded cattle train, he used the thin, tattered blanket they had given him earlier, and “climbed to somebody’s shoulder and hooked it strong” above the other prisoners in the cattle car (Spiegelman, 245). This allowed Vladek the opportunity to “rest and breat...
The Holocaust took a great toll on many lives in one way or another, one in particular being Vladek
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
The Holocaust affected many individuals, but mainly the Jewish society; an individual may not realise how expansive the slaughtering of millions of Jews in the Holocaust was. In the book, And Every Single One Was Someone, the word “Jew” was repeated 4,800 times on a single page, and was concluded with a total of 6,000,000 words in the book! (Chernofsky) Not many people actually think about how big 6,000,000 people is, but this book gives a physical representation to how many innocent Jewish individuals were wrongfully killed in the Holocaust.
The book Maus, by Art Spiegelman, it is the true story of his fathers life, mainly during the Jewish concentration camps. The chronicle is displayed in such a way it grabs the reader’s attention right away and gets them hooked on the story. Art Spiegelman’s dad, Vladek, explains to his son about the duress, and the excruciating pain he went through during the time of the concentration camps. Art retells the story exactly how his father told him, he did not concoct it, nor did his father mitigate how the concentration camps really were. Living in Sosnowiec, Poland at the time with his wife, Anja, Vladek owned a textile shop. They lived in a nice home, anything but destitute looking. Soon his shop would be closed by the Jewish police, this is because they felt they were superior to Jews, and need to debase them. Although all the Jews started hiding out in attics, cellars, and other hiding spots, the Nazi’s always discerned where they were. Vladek worked on cultivating a better and better bunker each time they need one. Vladek was a maverick, he definitely didn’t live a normal Jewish life. He was always willing to sacrifice certain items just to obtain a hiding spot, or to live one day longer, thus making him a benefactor. There was not much to do in these bunkers, but keep quiet. Anja wrote in her diary, hoping that one day she could bequeath it to her son, in which maybe he’ll find some interest in it. One time Vladek, Anja, and the rest of Anj...
In the "New Afterword" to the 1995 reprint of Escape From Sobibor, Richard Rashke makes explicit what was already implicit in the original 1982 edition. He forthrightly challenges historians of the Holocaust to reexamine a "flawed premise" of much of their writing. Unconsciously accepting the flawed premise that "if the Nazis...did not give it much significance, it wasn't significant," Rashke argues, historians have distorted the nature of the Jewish response to the Final Solution. Most historians have mistakenly portrayed Jews "as a flock of sheep on the road to slaughter," he insists, "causing intense suffering and irreparable damage to the Jewish people." He offers his own book as an antidote. The story of the escape from Sobibor and those who survived it, he argues, "represents the buried stories of hundreds of thousands who fought and died in ghettos no one ever heard of; who tried to escape on the way to camps but never made it; who fought back inside camps but were killed anyway; who managed to escape only to be recaptured and executed; who formed or joined partisan groups from the woods of Vilna to the forest of the owls and who never saw liberation...." I find Rashke's argument very convincing, and I would like to encourage others who teach about the Holocaust to join me in reexamining the way we present the Jewish response to the Final Solution to our students.
The Holocaust was a time of devastation and wrongdoing. It was also a time of cruelty and inhumanity. The Holocaust occurred over the course of twelve years during World War II. Although nearly six million Jews were killed, some survived and lived to tell their stories. The works of Kitty-Hart Moxon (Documentary: A Day In Auschwitz), Elie Wiesel (excerpt Night), and Mikhail Onanov (Holocaust Painting) all portray the hardships and struggles for survival during the Holocaust; their stories exemplify powerful depictions of the Holocaust concentration camp
Sidewalk is a book written by Mitchell Duneier, an American sociology professor at Princeton University, in 1999; where the book has gained a lot of favorable reviews, leading its winning the Los Angeles Times Book prize and C. Wright Mills Award. Similarly, the book had become a classic in urban studies, especially due to the interesting methodology, which was used by Duneier while he was conducting his research. The book is based on observations, participant observation and interviews, which gave the author the ability to live and interact with the book and magazine vendors on daily bases. Although, this gave him an insight into the life of the sidewalk, many methodological issues have concerned scholars and students of sociology since the day this book was published. Duneier had admitted during the book that he couldn’t be completely subjective while conducting his research and writing his book due to his involvement and personal relationship with people who work and live at the sidewalk, which raise the question, whether the research is still relevant if the researcher is only giving us an objective outcome?
Many people during the Holocaust made choices that could either be small or life changing. Simple choices and actions could very easily get a person killed in those times. The Holocaust is one of the most devastating historical times that has ever happened to this day. Over eleven million people were murdered during the Holocaust. Six million were Jews and the rest were from other ethnic groups such as the Slavs or Roma. Some of these deaths were caused by simple choices that people made. Millions of people during the Holocaust made difficult choices that can be displayed in two pieces of Holocaust Children’s Literature, the amazing and fictional story of The Book Thief, an amazing true tale called Eva’s
Through the Holocaust and through the fighting, the hunger and the fear, those persecuted managed to hold on to hope, the one thing no Nazi could break. Though the camps were liberated in 1944-1945, the horrors had already been committed. The death counts of the Nazi prisoners go as high as 13 million, but even with this the Jews still held out hope, still kept fighting, even as they were dragged from their homes into the Death Camps that awaited them, And it is for this reason that none will ever truly forget all the atrocities, horrors and, most importantly, the victims.
The novel Upside Down, by Eduardo Galeano depicts the injustices and unfairness of several branches of the global society. The differences between the colonized and the colonizer as Galeano writes is always growing and so is the gap between rich and poor. The author challenges western and eurocentric minds as to why on average, countries in the northern hemisphere have a higher standard of living than countries in the southern hemisphere. At first as a reader I thought the writer was whining about the unfairness of the world, but it is the social opiates such as the false idea of capitalism and choice that keeps us in check in this so called democracy. The author forces the reader to open their hearts to a concept that today's capitalist, power hungry society has almost forgotten
The Holocaust is a devastating event that affects “all Jews, without exception” and defies the normal gender separations (Levi 14). Men and women alike, along with children, file into the concentration camps together because “misfortune ha[s] struck [them] together” (Levi 19). Almost always, families are split up and men are forced to leave their wives and their children when “the night swallow[s] them up” and they begin their journey under Nazi rule, while “[their] women, parents, [and] children disappear” (Levi 20). The experience of the Holocaust differs between men and women due to their biological makeup, but the women are not spared in any way. Women are not able to endure such brutal conditions as well as the men can and are much more vulnerable, causing their bodies and their mental states to deteriorate faster. Upon entering the concentration camps, “mothers [do] not want to be separated from their children” because their role in society outside of the concentration camps is to care for their children; and, their maternal instincts cause the women to feel a harsh pain and a longing for their children and families (Levi 19). The Jewish people even start to think that the Nazis are treating the Holocaust as “a game to mock and sneer” at them while they watch them suffer and cope with the brutalities and the separation of their families (Levi 24). The Holocaust robs the Jewish people of all of their independence, humanity, and sense of self-worth during the holocaust and they will “carry the tattoo on [their] left arm until [they] die” (Levi 27). The Nazis “transform [the Jews] into slaves”, causing them to “reach the bottom”, and they begin their “demolition” of a human being, which causes any distinguishing factor
Chance and choice are completely different paths that can be taken to make decisions. The former is based on loss of control and refractory fate. The latter, however, allows there to be a perfect balance between hope, fate, and effective action-taking. While chance and choice are opposites, chance can open opportunities to make choices, and choices can create chances that allow things to happen that would not otherwise occur. “Night”, “The Book Thief” and “The Diary of Anne Frank” are all examples of novels where characters during the Holocaust took life changing decisions, defined by their chances and
In Pouliuli, a novel written by Albert Wendt, Faleasa Osovae awakens to find the life he’s been living all along is a mere façade. Pouliuli invites readers into the Samoan community of Malaelua, which is turned topsy-turvy when Faleasa misleads his aiga and community by acting maniacal. Albert Wendt ties a famous Malaelua saga about a mythological hero named Pili to Faleasa Osovae’s life. In the myth as well as in Faleasa’s story, they both had the same goal, which was to live the rest of their life “free”. To accomplish this goal, they both had to accomplish three tasks. Pilis’ tasks were to eat a mountain of fish which the giant’s had caught that day, to race the giants down a river, and make himself disappear. Faleasas’ tasks were to destroy Filemoni, Make Moaula the new leader, and remove Sau and Vaelupa as council leader. Of course they couldn’t have done these tasks alone so both of them enlisted help from friends. Pili enlisted the help of Tausamitele, Lelemalosi, and Pouliuli. Faleasa enlisted the help of his long time friend Laaumatua and his son Moaula. Finally to get the freedom they so wished for they had to complete one last task. In Pili’s case it was to divide his kingdom among his children while Faleasa had to remove Malaga as congress of the village. In the end, they both end up with nothing. Both ending up in the darkness of Pouliuli.
For most people, survival is just a matter of putting food on the table, making sure that the house payment is in on time, and remembering to put on that big winter coat. Prisoners in the holocaust did not have to worry about such things. Their food, cloths, and shelter were all provided for them. Unfortunately, there was never enough food, never sufficient shelter, and the cloths were never good enough. The methods of survival portrayed in the novels Maus by Art Spieglmen and Night by Elie Wiesel are distinctly different, but undeniably similar.
The novel Tsotsi, by Athol Fugard, is a story of redemption and reconciliation, facing the past, and confronts the core elements of human nature. The character going through this journey, who the novel is named after, is a young man who is part of the lowest level of society in a poor shanty town in South Africa. Tsotsi is a thug, someone who kills for money and suffers no remorse. But he starts changing when circumstance finds him in possession of a baby, which acts as a catalyst in his life. A chain of events leads him to regain memories of his childhood and discover why he is the way he is. The novel sets parameters of being “human” and brings these to the consideration of the reader. The reader’s limits of redemption are challenged as Tsotsi comes from a life lacking what the novel suggests are base human emotions.