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Passover Chapter 19

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I agree with the argument (Gaies) that Chapter 16 (“Passover”), rather than Chapter 19 (“The End of This World Begins Now”), is the dramatic high point of the novel. First of all, we knew there were some survivors of Lubizec. While the number was incredibly small, we still read the survivor accounts of Zischer and Damiel. So, the fact that they successfully escaped was not the most dramatic point for me. If it were not for Chapter 16, Chapter 19 would not have happened the way it played out. A tipsy Guth and his guards entered Barrack 14 on a January night in 1943. These men had the audacity to force the Jewish men to show them how they celebrated Passover. The guards wanted to observe them like pets, turning their sacred holiday into a …show more content…

Most of the people that entered these camps were dead within an hour after arriving. Since the number of survivors were next to none, it is hard for us to understand or even put this horror into words. In this book, Patrick Hicks uses the narrator to point out the inadequacy of language to represent Lubizec.
Especially throughout chapter two, Life in a Death Camp, the narrator stops to point out the difficulty of trying to find words to describe this camp entirely. Lubizec was created to kill Jews as quickly and efficiently as possible. 99 percent of people who entered Lubizec were murdered, and because of this it is impossible to describe and explain it justice. As the narrator stated, “In order to describe a place we need to talk in terms of presence, but they only way to describe an extermination camp is through absence”. By this he means we can talk about the procedures and daily operations but we are forgetting the individual lives which were lost. What words could possibly pay homage to those souls? This is what he wants us to ponder. Sure, we can discuss how men and women were separated and what they were forced to do, but this is still procedural. Authors could use the words pain and fear to describe what the Jews were feeling, but do they really have meaning? The narrator explains how everyone reading the book, with creature comforts surrounding them, can put it down and forget about Lubizec. These

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