One Survivor Remembers

1)   For me the images that were the most powerful were the pictures of the mass graves. They were the most powerful to me because when I looked at those pictures it made me think that this had happened hundreds of times during the war and all of the people that were killed. I think that they put these pictures in then beginning of the film to show what the film is talking about and that this happened to the families of the people in the movie.

2)   The Nazis dehumanized Jews by separating them from their families. They would take them away from them to make the Jews feel like they were alone and to make them even more sad. Gerda overcame this by keeping hope and through her friends. She stayed with them and they were able to stay alive and make important decisions in their lives.

3)   Some of the things that I would miss if they were taken away from me would be my pets and some simple things like my house. One thing that I think I take for granted would be the lifestyle that I have. I live better than the people who were taken by the Holocaust. I think that I would miss my way of life a lot if it was taken away from me.

4)   We like to say that these were such horrible times but it wasn’t that long ago and there are still people who do these things today. Many people are still racist, and there are still hate groups. I think that the only way to fight these groups is to protect the people who they want to hurt and to fight back by letting them realize that acting like this will never get them anywhere.

5)   I think that the heroes of this film are Gerda and her friends, but also the women who saved her life in the labor camp. I think that Gerda was very strong because she was able to remain hopeful during this, but the women who saved her went against what others thought of her and helped the girls. I think that we can make the world better by learning about this and making sure that nothing even slightly similar to this ever happens again.

Emil and Karl #3

I am reading a book called Emil and Karl. In this book it is very like what I have read in articles about the Holocaust. In the book Emil and Karl are orphaned by the Nazis and have nowhere to go. This is like an article that I read about how during the Holocaust 1.5 million kids were killed and many were left without parents. In the book they are both doing what children their age would do; be put to forced labor. The main children that they targeted were Jewish and Romani (Gypsy) children, but they also targeted many other children. They wanted to create what they thought to be a perfect world so they went to child institutions where the kids had physical and mental disabilities. They would go to these places and they would either take these children or eliminate them on the spot.

In Emil and Karl they both are temporarily taken in by a women and man who work in Karl’s old building. This is like in the article I read where a man named Janusz Korczak who was an orphanage director who refused to leave the kids and died as a result. He is also in the other book that I read Milkweed. He helps out the protagonist in that book named Misha, and the last time Misha sees him he is being led onto a Nazi train with the orphans. The article it talks about how that many kids died from starvation and that probably would have happened to Emil and Karl if the people in the book didn’t help them. The man who took them in went into a rage about the Nazis when he heard about what happened to the boys and when they came back a few hours later he was taken by the Nazis, leaving his wife with Emil and Karl. This shows how quickly word spread and how many people supported the Nazis. In another article that I briefly looked through it said that Vienna, the city that they are in makes up twenty eight percent of Austria’s population at the time. It also said that one hundred sixty thousand Jews lived in this town.

In the article that I read they speak of Kinder transports. Where people would take children from Nazi run towns away on trains. It makes me wonder if this will happen to Emil and Karl. I wonder if they will ever see their parents like so many children didn’t get to do. I also wonder if Nazis will take them away. In the article it talks about how hundreds of children were kidnapped and taken away so they can be used in the way that they saw fit. I want to know how much like the research I have done their lives will be like, and how many of the statistics of this horror they will act in.

National Holocaust Museum

Emil and Karl#2

For my second post on the book Emil and Karl I will be writing about how the protagonists compare and contrast. The other books that I am including are Milkweed, and Night. In Milkweed the protagonists name is Misha, and in Night the protagonists name is Elie. In the books they are all strong, loving people who are naive about what is happening and why. In Milkweed, Misha is an orphan boy who is adopted by a Jewish family during the Holocaust, but keeps his ties with the other orphans. Throughout the book he helps his new family and the orphans by stealing food. He is very naive about what is happening but what he does know he is very good at. He has never received any schooling and has never seen his real parents. He is different from Karl and Elie in this aspect because they both knew at least one of their parents and were both students. Misha is different from Karl because he is now Jewish and Karl is not, but they are very similar because they both are independent and are about nine in the majority of the story. Elie is different because he is fifteen in the story. I think that they are all young in the stories because it makes the book have a more interesting perspective.

In all of the books they all want themselves, and their families to survive. In Night, Elie is in a concentration camp, and could be killed at any time. In Emil and Karl, they can both be found out and taken away, to where Emil’s father was killed. In Milkweed, Misha is in the ghetto and needs to steal food and avoid the Nazis to survive. A conflict that they each have, is that they need to avoid the Nazis and need to make sure that they protect each other. Some conflicts that they have differently are that in Emil and Karl, and Night, they both are surrounded by them and people like them, but in Milkweed he needs to avoid them instead of deal with them.

I have found that all of the characters have the same basic motivations. They all want to help someone else and all want to make life easier for everyone. In Milkweed and Night, they want to free the Jews from the Nazis, and in Emil and Karl they want to get rid of the threat of the Nazis. They do have different motivations also, because Misha wants to stay alive and leave the ghetto, Elie wants people to know and help with the concentrations camps, and Emil and Karl want their parents back, and to leave. As a whole, they are all very similar, but when you look at the specific details of their lives you see in how many ways they are different.

Emil and Karl #1

For my second book club book I will be writing about a book called Emil and Karl. In this book there are two friends; one who is Jewish and the other who is not. This book takes part in the earlier part of the war. In the book Emil and Karl are about nine years old and go to the same school. They are very close friends who look out for each other and are both being ridiculed because Emil is Jewish. In the story they both are being bullied and beaten up because they respect and are Jewish. “Filthy Jew, Filthy Jew” the children cheered. “Stop bullying him” Karl yelled putting himself between Emil and the crowd, protecting him with his broad back.”(P#18) This shows that the children are learning things from their parents and that the problem is spreading to even them. Emil’s and Karl’s teacher was nice at one point but she was ordered to treat any Jewish kids badly because of what the principle believed. She didn’t want to act like this but she was forced to and can be fired and taken away.

One of the first problems in the story is that in the beginning of the book Karl’s mother was taken away by Nazi’s. She was taken away because she supported the Jews, and Karl was left there with a man who said, “Wait until they come for you” (P#7) Emil’s mother wouldn’t let Karl into there home because she said that it would be bad for all of them if he was seen there. The part of the story that I read ended with Karl knocking on Emil’s door because he had nowhere else to go. The story takes place during the early stages of the Holocaust in Vienna. They live in a neighborhood where the vast majority of the people there hate Jewish people and attack them in the street. It isn’t a safe neighborhood and there are Nazis policing the streets. A question that I have is will Karl ever see his mother again, and will he be able to stay with Emil and get help?

Night

For my second book club post I will be writing about an exert from a book called Night. The part that I read is about a girl during the Holocaust writing about how she was crammed into a train and forced to ride to a labor camp. She writes about being in the train and how traumatic it was and how it made some people actually lose their minds. In the exert she writes about a woman named Mrs. Schachter and her son, and how during the trip she writes about how she kept yelling “Fire, I see a fire! I see a fire!” (P#2) During the story she becomes so obsessed with yelling this that at one point some of the men actually bound and gag her in front of her son; so that they can get their minds off of where they are all headed.

            I have many questions about after this part of the story. Does the main character die in the labor camp, does Mrs. Schachter calm down after they reach the end of their horrible ride, and do most of them die in the labor camp like so many others? I can infer that there are hundreds packed into all of the cattle carts of the train in total, because it speaks about how trapped they are. It also talked about how the luck ones are the ones who get to be stuck by a window so they can see something while the others just look each others sadness. “We decided to take turns sitting down. There was little air. The lucky ones found themselves near a window: they could watch the blooming countryside flit by.”(P#1) When I read this I think about how we all look back on the days that this is happening and we are sad but the people who were actually in it look back on those days with despair.

            Another question that I have about later in the book is what happened to Mrs. Schachter’s little boy. The main character said that she thought that he was about ten years old. Did he leave his mentally unstable mother, did he leave the labor camp, and did he ever do anything important? From reading a little bit of the story it leaves me with a lot of questions, but it also leaves me with very little things to infer because from the piece of the story I read anything that I would try to infer later in the story would be a wild guess. This story makes me think about all of the people who were killed and about all of the people who suffered for others blind hatred.

Milkweed post #1

For my first post in book clubs I will be writing about a book called Milkweed. This is a story about a young orphan who has to steal food in order to survive. He is living during WWII and is with other orphans all fighting to live. He lives in the streets of Warsaw, a town in the middle of the war. He doesn’t know who he is and doesn’t know what is going on and what is happening. When he steals food people yell “Stop Thief.” This makes him think that his actual name is “Stopthief,” and makes him no longer care about when people yell at him because he is stealing. He doesn’t know what Jewish people are and doesn’t even know what the war is.

            The leader of the other orphans name is “Uri” and he is older and more experienced than “Stopthief.” The book starts with, “Stopthief,” running away, from stealing bread from a rich women. He meets “Uri” because he was about to steal the same bread. “Your lucky that I didn’t kill you, he said, that lady you took this from, I was getting ready to snatch it for myself,”(p#2) this shows how hard and cutthroat the streets are and how much the kids have to struggle just to stay alive. People think of them as nothing and they think of themselves the same way. In the story a Jew is a term used for someone who is small and not worth much. In the book they think of bugs and themselves as “Jews” because no one likes them and no one wants them around. They don’t think of Jewish as a religion, but as something that is less than nothing. This shows that they don’t understand what the religion is and they only know what they have been taught about how people in this time view Jewish people.

            The main problem so far for these kids in the book is that they are stuck in the middle of a war that they have no idea about and that no one is willing to help them for they are to afraid to help anyone but themselves. They live in a stall with a horse and when they go out in the streets people look at them with pity and resentment. They see the tanks going through the streets and hear the artillery cannons going off but they don’t know what is going on. All they know is that they need to steal from others, and that others should be suspicious of them.

What to Do?

        In English class, we have to post about things that we talk about, but whenever I try to think about what to do I always come up with a blank. I can think of topics but when I try to go deeper into the topic I just can't think of anything. I don't what to be wrong about something, and don't want to do something that I don't really care about. Something that I have always had trouble with is talking about things that are  strange for me and I think that a big portion of blogging is that. I need something to make me think more about what I want to write.