"In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn". This is the opening line in the novel Sophie's Choice by William Styron. In addition to being the opening line, it is the way we are introduced to our narrator, Stingo. To begin this story, Stingo moves into an apartment in Brooklyn after leaving his job at a publishing house called McGraw-Hill, and begins to work on his own novel where his true passion lied. In this Brooklyn building, Stingo comes to know his upstairs neighbors Sophie Zawistowaska and her lover Nathan Landau. This relationship, we come to find, is tainted by Nathan's violence and jealous ways. Stingo quickly develops an infatuation with Sophie, who becomes our main character. As we read about her we learn a lot about her past and why she is who she is during the length of the novel.
Sophie was a Polish women and a survivor of Auschwitz, a concentration camp established in Germany during the Holocaust in the early 1940s. In the novel we learn about her through her telling of her experiences, for instance, the murder of her husband and her father. We also come to learn of the dreadful decision she was faced with upon entering the concentration camp, where she was instructed to choose which one of her two children would be allowed to live. She chose her son. Later we learn of her short lived experience as a stenographer for a man by the name of Rudolph Hoss, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. During her time there, Sophie attempted to seduce Hoss in an attempt to have her son transferred to the Lebensborn program so that he may have been raised as a German child. Sophie's attempt was unsuccessful and she was returned back to t...
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...ness that is the fact how easily we forget that all the victims of the Holocaust where victims together, and they where not all Jewish. If it is a critics aim to have every account of the Holocaust told through the eyes of a Jewish person, then we would be at a great lost. Our existence in the society we live is not based on one sided accounts of our history. The more angles used to examine a situation, the better the solution can be seen, because the situation is better understood with every turn. Had Sophie's Choice been a story centered on a Jewish woman, it would be another account of a situation from the same angle, opening our eyes to nothing. The wisdom of one to appreciate the wisdom of another can have nothing but positive consequences. Styron's style of writing such much about who he is, as did it say much about his concern with the attitude of society.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” (Elie Wiesel) The Holocaust is a topic that is still not forgotten and is used by many people, as a motivation, to try not to repeat history. Many lessons can be taught from learning about the Holocaust, but to Eve Bunting and Fred Gross there is one lesson that could have changed the result of this horrible event. The Terrible Things, by Eve Bunting, and The Child of the Holocaust, by Fred Gross, both portray the same moral meaning in their presentations but use different evidence and word choice to create an overall
What Gerda wrote was real not a writer using people’s stories to make one. But when people make their own stories about the Holocaust, they could use Gerda’s as an example because she wrote the book so well and detailed that I thought that I was there with her. I think Gerda did an amazing job writing this book and putting so much work and detail into it. I’ve concluded that I even have a different perspective on the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a horrible thing, and although I have read several books, this one was real and not sugar coated. I know now what the Jews and many others went through and how much they suffered. I think that what surprised me the most was that the SS locked the Jews in the factory with the bomb. They had to be heartless to do that to anybody. Everything they did in general from the horrible food (bread and coffee) they gave them to the jobs they have them (flax detail). Although it was a struggle for Gerda to get out of the camps, at least she found her happy ending with her
With the amount of anti-Semitic activity in Germany, no Jew was safe and Helen realized this quickly. In order to protect her child he had to give her to family to keep her safe. “There we said goodbye as casually as possible and gave these strangers our child.” After this moment, Helen’s fight for survival to see her child once again. Finding a place to hide became very difficult as no one wanted to host a Jewish family due to the fear of the Nazis finding out. “People were understandably nervous and frightened, so the only solution was to find another hiding place.”
The quote that stuck with me trough the book was one not so much about the emotions that can with the Holocaust, but more of the actions that people at this time must do.
Hitler Youth was an organization that Hitler created for young children and teenagers of Germany to join to help him create solutions to Germany’s problems. In order to become a part of the Hitler Youth, one had to provide the proof that they were not in any way, shape, or form have a Jewish ancestry. This organization also gave some children an opportunity to rebel against their parents views of how the Hitler Youth organization was too militaristic for them. The main character in this book is named Sophie Scholl. Sophie was a German girl who had joined the Hitler Youth organization at a young age and was excited to meet new friends and learn new tactics on how to fight in the
...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,
Sarah and her mother are sought out by the French Police after an order goes out to arrest all French Jews. When Sarah’s little brother starts to feel the pressures of social injustice, he turns to his sister for guidance. Michel did not want to go with the French Police, so he asks Sarah to help him hide in their secret cupboard. Sarah does this because she loves Michel and does not want him to be discriminated against. Sarah, her mother, and her father get arrested for being Jewish and are taken to a concentration camp just outside their hometown. Sarah thinks Michel, her beloved brother, will be safe. She says, “Yes, he’d be safe there. She was sure of it. The girl murmured his name and laid her palm flat on the wooden panel. I’ll come back for you later. I promise” (Rosnay 9). During this time of inequality, where the French were removing Sarah and her mother just because they were Jewish, Sarah’s brother asked her for help. Sarah promised her brother she would be back for him and helped him escape his impending arrest. Sarah’s brother believed her because he looks up to her and loves her. As the story continues, when Sarah falls ill and is in pain, she also turns to her father for comfort, “at one point she had been sick, bringing up bile, moaning in pain. She had felt her father’s hand upon her, comforting her” (Rosnay 55).
The Holocaust was a terrible time, where the Nazis were eliminating Jews due to a misunderstanding that was passed down from Adolf Hitler to the Germans. Hilter filled the minds of Germans with hatred against Jews. Books such as Maus and Anne Frank has been able to suppress the horror of the holocaust. Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is about Art Spiegelman’s father Vladek Spriegelman and his experiences enduring the holocaust. Anne Frank, by Ann Kramer is about Frank and her friends and family struggling to survive the holocaust, yet in the end only her dad, Otto Frank is the only survivor. The author of the book Anne...
Elie is a fourteen year old innocent and obedient boy dedicated to religious studies with a deep faith in God and total devotion to his father and his beautiful nurturing family. He lives a peaceful, meaningful live appropriate for his age. One day, his world turned upside down by cruel and surreal events. After the Nazis invade Hungary, they ship his family to the Auschwitz concentration camp. During that ordeal, the beasts separate him from his town, then from his mother and young sisters. In similar fashion, his Jewish community, composed of loving families, gets abandoned to the psychopathic designs of Adolf Hitler. When Elie arrives at Auschwitz’s gates, he describes the scary experience
In the years after the Holocaust the survivors from the concentration camps tried to cope with the horrors of the camps and what they went through and their children tried to understand not only what happened to their parents. In the story of Maus, these horrors are written down by the son of a Holocaust survivor, Vladek. Maus is not only a story of the horrors of the concentration camps, but of a son, Artie, working through his issues with his father, Vladek. These issues are shown from beginning to end and in many instances show the complexity of the father-son relationship that was affected from the Holocaust. Maus not only shows these matters of contentions, but that the Holocaust survivors constantly put their children’s experiences to unreasonable standards of the parent’s Holocaust experiences.
The Holocaust was a very impressionable period of time. It not only got media attention during that time, but movies, books, websites, and other forms of media still remember the Holocaust. In Richard Brietman’s article, “Lasting Effects of the Holocaust,” he reviews two books and one movie that were created to reflect the Holocaust (BREITMAN 11). He notes that the two books are very realistic and give historical facts and references to display the evils that were happening in concentration camps during the Holocaust. This shows that the atrocities that were committed during the Holocaust have not been forgotten. Through historical writings and records, the harshness and evil that created the Holocaust will live through centuries, so that it may not be repeated again (BREITMAN 14).
Jane Yolen once said: “Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory.” Preserving the memories of the horrifying incidents of the Holocaust is the best way to ensure nothing like it ever occurs again. Authors use their novels to try and pass these memories down through generations. Examples of this are the novels Night by Elie Wiesel, and MAUS by Art Spiegelman. The main discussion in these novels revolves around the Holocaust and the violence against Jews. Both have captivating stories and are worthy of recognition, but MAUS is a better novel for educating students. This is because unlike Night it discusses the familial guilt faced by the families of Holocaust survivors. In addition, MAUS gives a visual
Atwood also references the oppression of Jew's during the holocaust in her novel. Under Hitler's rule 6 million Jews were killed, and many more sent to concentration camps where they were mistreated by their captors.
John Boyne's book "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" invites the readers to embark on an imaginative journey at two levels. At the first level, Boyne himself embarks upon an imaginative journey that explores a possible scenario in relation to Auschwitz. Bruno is a 9 year old boy growing up in a loving, but typically authoritarian German family in the 1930?s. His father is a senior military officer who is appointed Commandant of Auschwitz ? a promotion that requires upheaval from their comfortable home in Berlin to an austere home in the Polish countryside. The story explores Bruno?s difficulty in accepting and adapting to this change - especially the loss of his friends and grandparents.
The Holocaust is one of the most horrific and gruesome events in world history. It took a great toll on millions of lives in one way or another. One person in particular is Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor. Maus, by Art Spiegelman, consists of two main narratives. One narrative occurs during World War II in Poland, and the other begins in the late 1970s in New York. In relation to each other these two narratives portray the past and present.Throughout the novel, we often see Art Spiegelman questioning why his father acts the way he does. Although the war is over, the events of the Holocaust continue to influence the life of Vladek. Why do we allow the past to effect the present? Vladek's personality is largely influenced by his Holocaust experience. In Maus I and II, Vladek was stubborn, selfish, and cheap because of his experiences in the Holocaust.