All But My Life By Gerda Weissmann Klein

Just dive in. You can swim. It will clear all the burden you have ensued throughout your life. It will be a fresh start. Trust yourself. The novel Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng, examines how failure stems from the fear to fail and are caused by sexism and racism, thus placing a burden on victims of this discrimination. Unfortunately, racism and sexism are constant forms of discrimination that have been holding individuals back from reaching their full potential for centuries. Discrimination is due to the tragic reality that people are fearful of the ones that are different from them. They fear that this different race or gender may upstage them in the competition of life. The Lee family unfortunately has to bear the burden of discrimination in their everyday life due to racism and sexism. This burden carries the Lee family down like an anchor billowing to the bottom on the sea in hopes to find peace once it hits the ground.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

Through my understanding of the book, Homeward Bound by Elaine Tyler May explores two traditional depictions of the 1950s, namely suburban domesticity and anticommunism. She intertwines both historical events into a captivating argument. Throughout the book, May aims to discover why “Post-war Americans accepted parenting as well as marriage with so much zeal” unlike their own parents and children. Her findings are that the “cold war ideology and domestic revival” were somewhat linked together. She saw “domestic containment” as an outgrowth of frights and desires that bloomed after the war. However, psychotherapeutic services were as much a boom then as now, and helped offer “private and personal solutions to social problems.” May reflects her views on the origin of domestic containment, and how it affected the lives of people who tried to live by it.

When Irene Safran was only twenty-one years old, her carefree life ended in the face of the Holocaust. Born to two Jewish parents as one of ten children-- four girls and six boys in all-- in Munkachevo, Czechoslovakia around the year 1923, her world changed in early April 1944 when she and her family were transferred to a Jewish ghetto. For the next year, Irene's life was a series of deaths, losses, and humiliations no human should ever have to suffer, culminating, years later, with a triumphant ending. Her story is proof that the human spirit can triumph over all manner of adversity and evil.

“I pray you never stand at any crossroads in your own lives, but if you do, if the darkness seems so total, if you think there is no way out, remember, never ever give up. The darker the night, the brighter the dawn, and when it gets really, really dark, this is when one sees the true brilliance of the stars.” These words were spoken by Gerda Klein, a Holocaust survivor. Her story is filled with desperation and an overwhelming sense of hope. Gerda Weissmann was born in Bielsko, Poland. Both of her parents and her older brother died during the Holocaust. She was somehow able to survive “the ghetto, deportation, slave labor camps and a three month death march. She was rescued by an American soldier named Kurt Klein. She ended up marrying him and moving to the United States.

Life is a precious thing, and it is so precious that some people will undergo severe anguish to hold on to it. During the 1930’s and 1940’s in Germany, people of the Jewish religion were diabolically oppressed and slaughtered, just for their beliefs. Some Jews went to extreme measures to evade capture by the German law enforcement, hoping to hold on to life. Krystyna Chiger was only a small child when her family, along with a group of other desperate Jews, descended into the malignant sewers to avoid the Germans. After living in the abysmal sewers for fourteen months, her group emerged, and when she became an adult, she authored a novel about her time in the sewer. When analyzing the literary elements utilized in her novel, The Girl in the Green Sweater, one can determine how tone and mood, point of view, and conflict convey the message of struggle and survival that was experienced during the Holocaust, and how they help the reader to understand and relate.

Between Dignity and Despair, a book written by Marion A. Kaplan, published in 1998, gives us a portrait of Jewish life in Nazi Germany by the astounding memoirs, diaries, interviews with survivors, and letters of Jewish women and men. The book is written in chronological order of events, from the daily life of German Jewish families prior to when the Holocaust began to the days when rights were completely taken away; from the beginning of forced labor and exile to the repercussion of the war. Kaplan tries to include details from each significant event during the time of the Holocaust. Kaplan

All But My Life is a memoir about a young Jewish girl, Gerda Weissmann, who was able to endure the hardships of World War II and the Holocaust. Gerda went through and saw more horrific things in the matter of a few years than any of us will ever have to face in our lifetimes. The fact that a girl this young and hopeless can withstand so much pain but yet contain so much strength should be an inspiration to all. Reading this book really opened my eyes to what the world can bring. After reading Gerda’s journey, I will never again complain of times being tough or depressing in my life. This book really meant a lot to me for that very reason. It is amazing that

In All But My Life, the memoir of Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein, the first bystanders the audience

“There is a watch lying on the green carpet of the living room of my childhood. The hands seem to stand motionless… freezing time when it happened,” (3). In this instant, Gerda Weissmann Klein’s life was changed forever. In 1939 Adolf Hitler obtained power and he used it for his own gain. He wanted to eliminate all of the Jewish people. Gerda Weissmann was one of the few Jewish people who he didn’t destroy. After her liberation, Gerda wrote All But My Life, in which she tells how she survives because of the hope to see her family again, her friends, and the promise that she made to her father.

The book “All But My Life” was an autobiographical piece of literature written by Gerda Weissmann Klein. The book was first published in 1957, but the version read is the expanded version published in 1995. The book was originally typed by the author, with the help of a few friends. Gerda never had the courage to show the book to a publisher until an acquaintance named Mr. Sloan expressed great enthusiasm about an early draft. The book follows the author during the Holocaust, starting with some time before the Germans enter her town of Bielitz, Poland. The author goes on to explain the hardships she and her family faced following until the author is separated from her family after being sent to a camp for Jews. The race of the book explains in great detail the labor the Weismann performed while moving from several camps leading up to her liberation. The rest of the book explains how she readjusted to being free and met her husband

Living in a third world country such as Africa gives us a direct knowledge on how much poverty has spent the majority of the world. In the book “The Life You Can Save” by Peter Singer wrote about how affluent people do not contribute to the African poor like children when they have the luxury lifestyle. His book led to arguments about the only way to solving world poverty is simply the money that is being spent on Indispensable, such as luxuries, should be donated to charity. Affluent and needy people live together in the same or different country, but the poor people die every single day by the cause of lack of food, shelter and medical care (Singer 15).So the author will try to open our eyes how the lower class die every single days. Thus, some people say that the author shares us a good idea about donation because Singer claims this is a demanding moral principle. It wouldn’t allow you from buying most luxury goods, extra clothes, video games. Others people say that it was a bad idea because of misinterpretation of moral obligation, privacy concern and generous giving does not often support people. I agree with latter. So the singer introduces for us a bad idea.

It was one of the worst human rights disasters ever to face our planet. Tens of millions of people, told they were not worth their own lives, were rounded up and marched off to camps where death was their almost certain fate. The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime during World War II has become the centerpiece for countless movies, books, essays, tv shows, and plays, each and every one shedding it’s own light on how it has affected different people and their families. Aryeh Lev Stollman and Art Speigelman are just two of the countless writers that have brought us emotional stories of families affected by the Holocaust. Stollman’s piece, Die Grosse Liebe, from his 2003 short story collection entitled The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, portrays a young boy who, after his father’s death, begins to learn more and more about his sometimes mysterious and self-hidden mother who has, for as long as young Joseph has known, been exiled in her own home where she speaks little and with almost no emotion whatsoever. Speigelman’s piece, an excerpt from his serialized book Maus, is a memoir in graphic form in which Speigelman himself asks his father to recount his days before, during, and shortly after the war. Both pieces provide an in depth look into the way the narrators learn about themselves, their family history, and the world in general.

In the book, The Second Circle: How to Use Positive Energy or Success in Every Situation by Patsy Rodenburg, the author really focuses on how people can change their life by using your energy in a more positive way. She discusses three circles of energy that everyone has experienced at some point but one out of the three circles is the one we tend to fall in the most. The second circle is where everyone should try to be in life while people who fall into the second and third circles will tend to not have as positive of a life as they will never live with a presence. Throughout the book she explains how something as simple as breathing can help us use more positive energy and keep us in the second circle while also giving very detailed

In All But My Life, the memoir of Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein, the first bystanders the audience sees are Gerda’s own neighbors.