Analysis Of The Book ' Between Shades Of Gray '

Aristotle once theorized, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” The book, “The Color of Water” describes the lives of James and Ruth McBride and their journeys to find this happiness. Both of these characters, among other characters in the book struggled for the majority of their lives with the issues of race. They felt as if they were caught between two different worlds; the world of blacks and the world of whites. These struggles left all of the characters feeling forlorn. In McBride’s memoir it is made clear that in order to find happiness, the characters must first be able to confront and then overcome the racial divisions that were so prominent in their lives.

The NKVD or the Soviet Secret Police treated their prisoners in cruel ways. They starved them to death, spat on their faces, slapped them, and called them pigs. Ruta Sepetys made sure to emphasize the NKVD’s treatment towards Lina, and the other prisoners, to showcase how they felt. It allowed the reader to step in their shoes. “It was hard to imagine that the war rages somewhere in Europe. We had a war of our own, waiting for the NKVD to choose the next victim, to throw us in the next hole. They enjoyed hitting and kicking us in the fields” (Sepetys, 163). The prisoners had to work in order to get their rations. They worked all day in order to receive one slice of bread, and on a good day, some

The book Black Hearts opened my eyes to how leadership from a single Officer can have a grappling effect on such a wide range of soldiers from the lowest of ranks. One of the best takeaways from Black Hearts is to never do anything: illegal, unethical, or immoral. Although this is a easy statement to repeat, Black Hearts demonstrates the difficulties that lie behind these words. It has also painted a picture of how leadership can topple extremely quickly from a top down view. The Army is portrayed in a bad light throughout the book relentlessly. This is due to the concentration of poor leadership of the 1-502nd Regiment (Referred to as “First Strike”), a battalion of the 101st Airborne Division.

The book, Between the Shades of Gray, takes place during World War II. The character Lina is arrested and deported by the NKVD following the annexation of Lithuania. She was then forced to provide labor in order to survive the extreme conditions of the Stalin’s camps. Her ability to cope, her relocation, and the death of her mother contributes to her development and survival.

The Great Terror was one of the single greatest loss of lives in the history of the world. It was a crusade of political tyranny in the Soviet Union that transpired during the late 1930’s. The Terrors implicated a wide spread cleansing of the Communist Party and government officials, control of peasants and the Red Army headship, extensive police over watch, suspicion of saboteurs, counter-revolutionaries, and illogical slayings. Opportunely, some good did come from the terrors nonetheless. Two of those goods being Sofia Petrovna and Requiem. Both works allow history to peer back into the Stalin Era and bear witness to the travesties that came with it. Through the use of fictional story telling and thematic devises Sofia Petrovna and Requiem, respectively, paint a grim yet descriptive picture in a very efficient manner.

In The Story of Blima: A Holocaust Survivor, author Shirley Russak Wachtel presents scenes depicting the worst that human beings are capable of, and the best. She skillfully contrasts her mother’s suffering at the hands of the Nazis with the loving treatment that Blima receives from three strong women. In the course of the story, Blima receives loving support from her mother; from the labor guard, Gizella; and from her sister-in-law, Ruschia.

The dictionary defines terror and genocide as ‘an extreme fear’ and ‘the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation” respectably. Within these parameters, it is suitable to state that the terrors the governments of Germany and Russia forced some of their citizens to endure are nothing less than acts of genocide. Between 1933 and 1949, over six million Jewish people from Germany and Europe perished in Nazi Concentration Camps during the Holocaust. In Stalin’s Russia, between four million and seventy million Russians departed from the Earth within the Soviet Gulags. Within these figures, there are over eighty million souls and eighty million individual experiences and stories that will never be told. Mikihal Bulgakov wrote, ‘manuscripts don’t burn,’ and following that, it could be said that ‘the voices of people do not die.’ Faint as they may be, the voices of the dead can be heard when one attempts to listen hard enough. Through the examination of memoirs of the survivors, it is possible to gain understanding into the lives of those who perished in these concentration camps. This essay will work to understand how in the moments before their murders, and disposal of their vessels within the Soviet Gulags and the Nazi Concentration Camps, lead to the dehumanization of the prisoners that perished within these camps.

“Death wrapped itself around me till I was stifled.” Elie Wiesel was a young boy, only 15 years of age, when he encountered the tortures of the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz. Another Auschwitz survivor, Susan Pollack, experienced the horrors of her family being taken away right before her eyes (Connolly) .The life stories of Elie Wiesel and Susan Pollack are two examples showing the graveness of the mass butchery and abuse the Auschwitz prisoners endured, therefore portraying their immense joy when they were liberated by the Soviet soldiers on January 27,1945 (Wiesel 92).

The Holocaust and war was no joking matter. Millions were executed both intentionally and unintentionally. Men, women, husbands, wives, parents, grandparents, and children; The SS didn’t care. Nor did the Poles, Germans, or anyone at all for that matter. Nobody cared about the “dirty Jews”, the “filthy dogs”, or the “swine dogs”. There were so many insults that it’s impossible to name them all. People were malnourished, lonely, and hopeless. This torture was part of the everyday life of a young man named Lucek Salzman (George Lucius Salton). This boy lost his parents at age 14 and his brother at age 15. He was beaten, he had paint poured over him, his latter was kicked by a German soldier (this ended up

A non-fiction narrative written by Anna Funder demonstrates thorough understandings of victims of the Stasi were never fully healed following the collapse of the East German regime. In the novel, Funder investigates the lives of different citizens in East Germany. Each individual, Funder has interviewed has shown different experiences in their live but they all had one thing in common. They all had some sort of interrelationship with the Stasi. Anna Funder has written this novel to illustrate the historical events occurred in Germany to raise awareness. The citizens pour their heart out whilst Anna is interviewing which made Anna emotionally attached to their story exposing the novel to be subjective. Funder illustrates more sympathy to those

The Holocaust is a very large topic with many subtopics within, which many people have never heard of. One in particular is the Hidden Children of the Holocaust. Like a majority of individuals, I never heard of this topic before, until I started my inquiry work. Hiding children during the holocaust was an effort to save thousands of children’s lives. The children were hidden in different ways, either with false identities, underground, and with or without their parents. The children with false identities were allowed to participate in everyday life activities, like attend school and socialize with children their age, which in the long run this lead to less emotional and mental issues. However, the children that were hidden and not allowed to leave their hiding spots often faced boredom, pain, and torment. Some children were capable of being hid with their parents while other children were not. Depending on the situation the child was in, depends on the effects it had on the child during this time. In this paper, I will be discussing works by two scholars, Natalia Aleksiun’s Gender and Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia and Judy Mitchell’s Children of the Holocaust. Aleksiun’s article talks about the daily lives of Jews in hiding and also about how they prepared their hideouts. Aleksiun’s article mainly focuses on children that were hidden with their families. In Mitchell’s article, he focuses on the hidden children and gives examples/survivor stories on what it

“Stalin was the leader of the USSR(Soviet Union) and the one responsible for the terrible times Lina and her family along with millions of other people had to go through.” ( ). Stalin was the one in charge of all the deportations. It was his choice, that all those people were taken away from their homes and tortured. Although only mentioned a few times in Between Shades of Gray, Stalin played a major role back then and in the novel.

I was sixteen years old when I was first confronted with tangible evidence of evil as I looked through a glass wall at the severed braids of Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. I had heard stories about the Holocaust in school and saw pictures of camp survivors prior to arriving, but as tears covered my cheeks I realized that dry recitals of facts and frozen images were completely inadequate to convey the depth of suffering experienced in that place. Nothing could have prepared me to see hundreds of neatly labelled suitcases which were never intended to reach their destinations or to walk into shower rooms and imagine the screams of children my age as they choked on poison gas. I looked at the German students visiting the memorial with me and realized that the “monsters” who had been at work during the Third Reich, the grandparents of many of my friends, were people just like me. I was unable to comprehend the type of hatred that could drive thousands of otherwise “normal” individuals to systematically isolate, torture, and seek to eradicate an entire ethnic group. The vague interest I previously had in human behavior transformed into a driving passion to discover why people do the things they do – a passion that lingers with me today as I observe

As soon as they arrived at the labor camps most were malnourished and were at their weakest breaking point. Many cracked, but it was people like Lina, her mother, her brother, and Mrs. Rimas who were able to find the strength to work without giving their dignity or fear to the Soviet Union. It was then when the leader of the labor camp woke everyone up in the middle of the night saying they had a “choice” wether or not to sign a document agreeing for them to join the collective farm, pay a war tax of two hundred rubles per person, and agree that they were criminals and their sentence should be twenty-five years hard labor where they need to stick up for their justice. People like the Vilkas and Mrs. Rimas refused to sign the documents although it would me that the Soviets would work and push them harder; they wanted to stand up for their natural rights. Soon after, some including the Vilkas and Mrs. Rimas were sent to Siberia in the middle of nowhere where the arctic winter, a time where half the year is spent in darkness, takes place. Individuals like Lina had/needed the audacity to sneak out of their mud huts and find items to use for warmth and food. As soon as Lina’s mother died, Lina was on the brink of giving up. Her father had been shot, her mother was now dead, she had to leave Andrius, and her brother was sick, but through her drawings

Gwendoline Christie once said, “Genuine and true love is so rare that when you encounter it in any form, it’s a wonderful thing, to be utterly cherished in whatever form it takes.” In the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James, Ana and Christian are two strangers, with different viewpoints on love. Their relationship shows that true love comes in different ways. Ana’s innocence and Christian’s impeccable voluptuous suit forces a bond, and intercedes them both to a ‘vanilla’ terrene.