Intolerance In The Book Thief

Not even the most powerful Germans could keep up with the deaths of so many people, and to this day there is no single wartime document that contains the numbers of all the deaths during the Holocaust. Although people always look at the numbers of people that were directly killed throughout the Holocaust, there were so many more that were affected because of lost family. Assuming that 11 million people died in the Holocaust, and half of those people had a family of 3, 16.5 million people were affected by the Holocaust. Throughout the books and documentaries that we have watched, these key factors of hate and intolerance are overcome. The cause of the Holocaust was hate and intolerance, and many people fighting against it overcame this hate

The Hubermanns decide to hide a Jewish man in their basement, and this struggle to keep him hidden is a fight in and of itself. Even Germans (like the Hubermanns) that were against the Führer were not allowed to voice their opinion, and therefore helped in any way they could. Although military-involved Germans would discriminate very often, as shown in the quote, “‘The maniacal soccer player!’... Does he know? Liesel thought. Can he smell we’re hiding a Jew?” (Zusak 343), the people of Germany were very scared about the future. This laid the ground for Hitler’s downfall. In The Book Thief, Rudy defies hate and intolerance through a simple act of rebellion. He refuses to give the Führer’s birthday, and suffers for it. Throughout The Book Thief, Markus Zusak shows readers that hate and intolerance were overcome throughout Germany even in the darkest times of the

In The Boy in The Striped Pajamas, a young boy named Bruno is friends with a child in a concentration camp, even though he knows he is not supposed to. In The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss, some of the Sneetches have stars and some do not. This leads to a lot of bullying, but in the end allows the Sneetches to realize that the way that someone looks does not matter. In The Harmonica, the young boy that is given a harmonica uses it to help many people feel better throughout the time of hate and intolerance. The boy plays for many people that live in a concentration camp. In The Whispering Town, many of the people overcome hate and intolerance by helping the Jewish people escape. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and the many children’s books written about the Holocaust help overcome hate and intolerance in today’s world, so that something as awful as the Holocaust will never happen