A poem that I have recently read that deals with a tragic event is Shooting Stars by Carol Ann Duffy. This poem is explaining the hardships that the Jews faced during Hitler's reign in World War II. This poem is set during the Holocaust in one of the many concentration camps. It describes the pains and suffering that they Jews had to face up to but many more other innocent people were suffering as well because one person wanted to annihilate them.
The title of the poem is Shooting Stars. I've analyzed it and come up with a few ideas why it was called this. The initials of the title (S.S.) could refer to the Nazi storm troopers who killed the Jews in the camps. When you see a shooting star you make a wish. Maybe the Jews were wishing to become free and also the poet wishes that this should never happen again. The crosshairs of a rifle would create a star on the heads of the Jew they were about to kill. Also, the Jews could be stars because of their bravery through the persecution that they have gone through. One last meaning is that the title could refer to the Star of David which is a Jewish symbol and that when the Nazis shoot the Nazis, they are really shooting stars of David. The Jews were also wearing an armband with a star on it to represent their name.
The Jews suffered terribly during their life in concentration camps. An example from the poem, ?waited for the bullet? suggests that the Jews knew that they were going to be killed. All they had to do was wait for it to happen. This is a terrible thought and shows what they had to suffer. Another quote to show how the Jews felt is shown in this quote, ?urine trickled down my legs?. This shows how disheartened and intimidated they were to the point where they couldn?t con...
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...tors that Dickmann was just one of some 900 Witnesses of Jehovah who suffered in Sachsenhausen for their beliefs. Many more suffered in other camps. Yes, even under the terrible conditions of the concentration camps, many remained faithful to godly principles.
To Jehovah?s Witnesses, it is a Christian duty to be ?in subjection to the superior [government] authorities.? (Romans 13:1) However, when governments try to force them to transgress God?s laws, they follow the example of Christ?s apostles, who said: ?We must obey God as ruler rather than men.? (Acts 5:29) As a result, in a world where tribal enmities and ethnic hatreds have led to shocking atrocities, Jehovah?s Witnesses everywhere, like August Dickmann, pursue peace. They follow the Bible?s exhortation: ?Do not let yourself be conquered by the evil, but keep conquering the evil with the good.??Romans 12:21.
In the NonFiction book Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee and Susan McClelland, a true story of a north korean boy named SungJu whose father was disgraced by the army forcing them to move from a nice city to a poor town where you have to fight for food. Losing both parents due to them leaving to find work or food and never coming back. He was forced at just 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself. In order to survive, Sungju forms a gang with his close new friends and lives by fighting, thieving, begging, performing, and traveling around getting arrested and overcoming many obstacles just to simply survive the rough streets of their new home, making new friends and enemies along the away. While they slowly discover the truth about
Night by Elie Wiesel and First They Came for the Jew by Martin Niemoller both show two perspectives of people throughout the Holocaust. The poem by Niemoller is about him staying silent to survive because the people they were coming for where not his people he shows this by saying “I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.” The book by Wiesel talks about just staying alive because he knew his chances of living were not great but pushing through as he says in this quote “I could have gathered all my strength to break rank and throw myself into the barbed wire.” As stated in both quotes both Night and First They Came for the Jews share the theme of survival. Even though what they had to do to survive is different Niemoller has to stay quiet to survive, but Wiesel has to do much more then just stay silent even though he must do that too.
It is estimated that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. A survivor from the Holocaust wrote about his time during the Holocaust. Elie wrote a book about his time in a concentration camp. Elie wrote a book called Night. In Night, Elie Wiesel uses soup as a motif to demonstrate that your food is more important than your life, as shown in the book when the man crawls to the soup and dies, when you’re sick, you’re entitled to thicker soup, and the soup was Elie’s entire life.
A poem that I have been studying recently is Assisi by Norman McCaig, which I found very interesting to read because it made a statement which relates to our world today even though the poem was wrote about thirty or forty years ago. The poem has lots of ideas including effective figures of speech, good choice of words, important images and irony. The statement that McCaig makes is, where ever there is great wealth it always exists along side great poverty.
It is almost unimaginable the difficulties victims of the holocaust faced in concentration camps. For starters they were abducted from their homes and shipped to concentration camps in tightly packed cattle cars. Once they made it to a camp, a selection process occurred. The males were separated from the females. Then those who were too young or too old to work were sent to the showers. Once the showers were tightly packed, the Nazi’s would turn on the water and drop in canisters of chemicals that would react with the water and release a deadly gas. Within minutes, everyone in the shower would be dead. The bodies would be hauled out and burned. Those who were not selected to die didn’t fair much better. Terrible living conditions, forced labor, malnourishment, and physical abuse were just a few of the things they had to endure. It was such a dark time. So many invaluable lessons can be learned from the holocaust and from those who survived it. One theme present in Elie Wiesel’s novel Night and Robert Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful is that family can strengthen or hinder one during adversity.
In "In Back From War,But Not Really Home" by Caroline Alexander, and "The Odyssey by homer both experience grief in their characters . survival , hope , and pain are the themes in the literature pieces .
The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden. Elie Wiesel shows that the relationship with his father was the strength that kept the young boy alive, but was also the major weakness.
The violent actions of the Germans during this event force an image upon them that conveys the message that the Germans had little respect for the life of a person, specifically that of a follower of Judaism, and their capability to act viciously. If the Germans are acting so cruel and begin to act this way as an instinct towards the Jews, they are losing the ability to sympathize with other people. This would be losing the one thing that distinguishes a human from any other species, and this quote is an example of the dehumanization of the victim, as well as the perpetrator. Later on in Night, all the Jewish prisoners discover their fate at the camps and what will happen to people at the crematorium. They respond by saying to the people around them that they “...can’t let them kill us like that, like cattle in the slaughterhouse” (Wiesel 31). This simile develops the theme by comparing the Jewish prisoners to cattle in a slaughterhouse and emphasizes what little value their lives had to the Germans, implying they are not worthy of human qualities. The Germans are once again not able to emphasize with the Jews that are around them and being murdered, which over the course of the novel leads to them being
Every day was a constant battle for their lives, and they never got a break. So many people died from getting sick or from the things the guards would do and no one could save them. The food was bad and they had to hurt each other to get more food so that they wouldn’t starve. They were forced to turn against each other to survive when they never should have had to. Life was never the same for those who went to Auschwitz and survived.
(It should be noted that when describing hardships of the concentration camps, understatements will inevitably be made. Levi puts it well when he says, ?We say ?hunger?, we say ?tiredness?, ?fear?, ?pain?, we say ?winter? and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day?? (Levi, 123).)
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
An example of adversity is the Holocaust - Hitler‘s plan to exterminate the Jews. In the memoir, Night, we discover how Elie Wiesel changes in response to his concentration camp experiences. The separation from his loved ones and the horrible conditions of these camps affect Elie immensely. Elie is affected in the following ways: physically, emotionally and spiritually. The Holocaust had changed him into a completely different person.
The Holocaust was a tragic event in history which instilled fear and sorrow in so many. This time can be seen as one without order, because the law at the time said the actions taken were just (epigraph translation). A poet was able, however, to take such a chaotic time in history in the poem The Book of Yolek, and create a more personal attachment (for the reader) to the topic. The poet Anthony Hecht has taken the Holocaust (more specifically the moving of Jewish orphans to a concentration camp) and made it simple and nostalgic, taking a more calm approach to the subject ("5th August 1942: Warsaw Orphans Leave for Treblinka"). By using the form of a Sestina (very precise form difficult to properly do), along with the images, rhetorical use of grammar, and the tone portrayed throughout the piece, Anthony Hecht demonstrates a peaceful outlook can be given to the most chaotic moments in human life (Strand et al. 20). However, he also demonstrates the need for emotional attachment when referring to an occurrence (in history) of the past.
...urvivors crawling towards me, clawing at my soul. The guilt of the world had been literally placed on my shoulders as I closed the book and reflected on the morbid events I had just read. As the sun set that night, I found no joy in its vastness and splendor, for I was still blinded by the sins of those before me. The sound of my tears crashing to the icy floor sang me to sleep. Just kidding. But seriously, here’s the rest. Upon reading of the narrators’ brief excerpt of his experience, I was overcome with empathy for both the victims and persecutors. The everlasting effect of the holocaust is not only among those who lost families÷, friends,
Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://davehood59.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/what-is-the-importance-of-setting/ Poems for Tragedy and Grief. n.d. - n.d. - n.d. Poets.org. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5886 Why Are Rhythm & Rhyme Important in Poems?. n.d. - n.d. - n.d. The classroom. Retrieved March 2, 2014, from http://classroom.synonym.com/rhythm-rhyme-important-poems-1921.html.