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.