Primary Sources Of The War

Human nature is truly a complex thing to understand. Jackie French has lured us into a world bursting with vital historical information, she has entangled in the novel, a series of facts about the many events that occurred in World War II. French has taken the time to structure this novel with sensitivity and sophistication. She has shown great sympathy towards the Jewish people throughout this captivating novel. The author then leads us onto a path to teach us the importance of history and the endless lessons we may learn from the mistakes of previous generations.

In order to fully understand a city or its history, you must also try to understand the people living within it. The Journal of Hélène Berr and the film “Free Men” provide insight for this and have some very strong shared themes. One very important theme of both the journal and the movie is perseverance. Both the journal and the film are set in German-occupied Paris during World War II. They provide insight into the way people of specific religions and backgrounds lived and thought during a dark time in Paris’s history. Many people, including those who were not from France, expressed their loyalty to the city of Paris and their unwillingness to step down through their thoughts and actions. Through this theme in both the journal and the film, one can better understand the mindset and the way of thinking of certain groups of Parisians in occupied Paris.

World War I changed the landscape of Europe, particularly France, like no war had ever before. The memoir, A Life of Her Own, depicts the experiences of Emilie Carles, a politically active French women. The memoir depicts the country’s history throughout, not only World War I, but most of the 20th century. Carles brother, Joseph, was caught in a German Prisoner of War camp for a good portion of the war. While there, he would write to the Carles and documented the horrors of war. The article A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I accurately demonstrates the letters exchanged between Joseph and his family throughout the duration of the war. The French economy needed an influx of workers to cope with the departure of abled bodied men while the war took place. For example, The Carles had to sacrifice any leisure time they had to deal with losing another worker on the family farm. These workers were replaced by immigrants. The impact of these new laborers is documented in Workers in France during World War I. The story of Emilie Carles and her family was just one of many examples of families that were dismantled emotionally and economically due to World War I.

Growing up in a wartime environment affects the identities, confidence and adolescence process for many people. In the books, The Diary of A Young Girl, Farewell to Manzanar, and Night, World War II accelerates Anne’s, Jeanne’s and Elie’s precious maturity and coming of age process. World War II, the Nazis and their identity of being Jewish forces Anne and Elie to grow up and mature much sooner than expected. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, World War II have a negative impact on Jeanne’s confidence and she starts to lose respect towards her Japanese heritage. All three of them are struggling to find out who they truly are. Anne Frank, Jeanne Wakatsuki and Elie Wiesel all are greatly affected by the war, but in different milieus and in

In Marie de France’s short story, “Lanval”, it is obvious that the state was in control of many lives. Throughout the

By reading both “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Testament of Youth”, we learn that World War 1 had a tremendous effect, not only on the men in the trenches; but essentially on everyone; of all genders throughout Europe and the World. Vera Brittains, “Testament of Youth” tells the tale of her experiences working as a V.A.D (Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurse) in many areas, however in chapters five and six, she is stationed in London. She describes, in vivid details the struggles of working as a nurse in London during the war. In Remarques’ novel, “All Quiet on the Western Front” we follow the life of a soldier, Paul Baumer who essentially enlists in the Army and is later deployed to the western front. Baumer experiences the horrors of war in many ways, due to this; he undergoes severe physical and psychological stress and he feels as if he will never be able to recover and become an ordinary civilian.

Each of these histories reveal a story of suffering that is endured by both Gentile and Jew, but also a story of humanity and salvation. In Five Chimneys: A woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz, Olga Lengyel tells of her family assisting other Jews fleeing the Nazi military. Later, after her own ordeals in Auschwitz, she was saved by citizens in a small Polish village. An essay written by Vera Laska is included in Women and the Holocaust: Different Voices, which is an anthology of essays about women in the Holocaust. In addition to the many stories of survivors and rescuers, I am using several scholarly articles

By cutting quickly between the two different characters, dealing with predicaments of two different time periods, the author forces the reader to ask many questions. Who are the people inviting Sarah and Rachel into their home? Are Sarah and Rachel truly safe in the care of the couple? Will they be turned over to the Gestapo or French police by the husband and wife? Yet, while thinking deeply about Sarah and Rachel, the reader is also intrigued by the coincident Julia uncovered between the apartment Mamé bought in 1942, and how it was bought soon after the apartment had been suddenly vacated following the Hel’

Of the 9 million Jews deported to the camps only 3 million survived. This book is filled with testimonies and people that were actually in the camps. Because of the survivors we know a lot about what happened during the Holocaust. “ Two young Jews escaped Auschwitz -Birkenau on April 7, 1944 and reached the Jewish underground in Czechoslovakia. They described what faced a prisoner who tried to escape.”

They had got too caught up in the tricks from Hitler because they were too vulnerable. So now we shouldn’t feel surprised at the French policemen at family homes, dragging them out and rounding them up for Hitler. Now we can understand why Rosnay, Tatiana DE quoted “the other man wrote a beige raincoat. He had a list in his hand. Once again, he said the woman’s name. And the father’s name, He spoke perfect French. Then we are safe, thought the girl. If they are French, not German, we are not in danger. If they are French, they will not harm us” (Rosany, 3). No one knew of the personal armistice and government secrets because it is nothing to share to the people. The French were like robots and do whatever is programmed and told so, and had not reason to do this, only because of Hitler. “She was safe she thought. She was safe, with her mother, with her father. This was not going to last long. This was the French police, not the Germans. No one was going to harm them” (Rosnay,19). The French had a huge impact on the Holocaust due to the relations with the Nazis and Hitler, so harming people was okay because of armistice, so of course do not mess up relations with Germans for the power of ruling a small part of France. Overall the French had an impact on the Holocaust due to them unraveling the issues with land and then making a truce/armistice, then becoming

Review of a Half-French Essay The essay by Gretchen van Slyke “Women at War: Skirting the Issue in the French Revolution” is an interesting essay, but for common readers this is not an essay for them, for there is French phrases that may not be commonly known. This essay was written for L’Esprit Créateur a journal that specializes on “Exploring all periods of French literature and thought …” (The John Hopkins). Even with all of the French phrases one is able to get the gist of the article.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a short book, but remarkably deep. More than 50 years after its jolting prose, haunting poetry, and powerful truths slashed their way into the consciousness of a worldwide readership, All Quiet still stands at the forefront of a host of novels on that most tragic recurrence in the history of human experience: war. All the aspects of trench warfare are present—excitement, boredom, horror, hunger, fear, dirt, alienation, imminent death, futility, to name a few. All Quiet has a pervasive sense of uselessness, an initially unvoiced but later fully expressed question of 'Just what is this war about, and why am I being put on the line for it?' The answer is, of course, nothing, and if All Quiet has but one overriding message, it is that war is awful, and young people ought not to fight. All Quiet is not a book which glorifies the German war effort, or portrays soldiers as heroes. In Remarque's own words, it is “an attempt to give an account of a generation that was destroyed by the war—even those of it who survived the shelling.” As such, it is brutal and confronting, but in the best possible way. Anti-war fiction has seldom been this effective, or this memorable for that matter.

The polarization of French society during the affair can thus be drawn back to those who supported the principles laid down in documents such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in which the affair represented not only an opportunity to defend Dreyfus but also the basic human rights of the revolutionary values that constituted the foundation of liberty and equality. On the other hand, the anti-Dreyfusard monarchists and nationalists drew from the legacy of the Ancien Régime, which symbolized traditional authoritarian and Catholic values as against individual freedom. Thus, we see that French nationalism never politically unified as it was torn between factions of republicanism and monarchism prior to the wake of the Dreyfus Affair. In this light, the affair must be understood against the backdrop of the disagreement in French identity and “new nationalism,” in which the rise of anti-Semitism can be viewed as an outgrowth of the competing national identities to promote national sentiment and convey political

The new head of the army’s intelligence unit, Georges Picquart, was the one who uncovered evidence pointing to another French military officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, as the real traitor proving Dreyfus not guilty of the crime of high treason. But his attempt to prove Esterhazy guilty, lead to him being silenced by being transferred to the southern desert of Tunisia in November 1896; his efforts led to nothing since Esterhazy was found not guilty by a secret court martial, before fleeing to England. Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy was also a key player in the Dreyfus Affair, because he was the spy for whose actions Dreyfus was blamed. Emile Zola, a famous French writer also played a key role in the Dreyfus affair, by chiefly owing to J'accuse, a vehement open letter published in a Paris newspaper in January 1898 after words of the military court's framing of Dreyfus and of an attempted cover-up began to spread. In 1898, when this controversial movement seemed to emergy, Forth explains that the “pornographic” novelist Emile Zola “further scandalized the nation by publicly accusing the French army of covering up the truth about the Dreyfus case” (1). Zola wrote this to prove people wrong, after Dreyfus was categorized as a traitor by the antisemitic movement for being “hailed from a people who were racially and culturally alien to the codes of honors of that

It’s 1939 and France has been faced with bombing raids, executions and famine. Slowly a resistance started to shape, but against such an enemy we all knew that little would change. The population waited for liberation, living day by day under a control of an iron fist imposed by the collaboration of the Vichy government, the SS and Gestapo.