Informal Reading Response #1 Nechama Tec’s autobiography Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood tells the narrative of her experiences as a young Jewish girl in Nazi occupied Poland during the second World War. Nechama was able to survive, and protect her family, through the Holocaust by hiding her true identity and pretending to be Polish. She was able to do this because of her blond hair, light skin, blue eyes, and ability to speak unaccented Polish, which made her physically indistinguishable from an “Aryan” child. Nechama Tec’s story emphasizes the themes of identity, cultural assimilation, and passing, both socially and physically, as something that you are not, while also attempting to convey the entirely contradictory, hypocritical, …show more content…
In light of the reading and lectures, this is quite a difficult question to answer. The truth is that Jews are not very different from any other people. They are not evil, they are not monsters, and they are certainly not more deserving of abuse or ostracization than any other group. In the case of Nechama Tec, it is impossible to conjure up any particular thing that made her different from the Poles. Her physical features appeared European, she did not demonstrate traditionally Jewish mannerisms, and her parents were not particularly religious. She was told several times, in fact, that she was not a real Jew. First, by a Polish woman named Genia, who would frequently proclaim that Nechama was “… such a lovely child, not Jewish at all, not at all” (Tec, 51), and then again by the Homars, who would say things like “You know that you are not a real Jew. You are not really Jewish.” (Tec, 121) These dialogues show just how nonsensical anti-Semitism was at the time. Clearly, most anti-Semites did not even understand what a real Jew was. Nechama Tec thoughtfully expressed these ideas later in the story, when she wrote the following about the Homars:
In a way they were right. We were not ‘typically Jewish,’ we did not conform to the image that phrase evoked for them. It did not matter that they had perhaps never encountered anyone who did conform to the image. That was irrelevant. They simply treated us as an exception, which allowed them to keep their anti-Semitism intact. (Tec,
Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.
The mid 20th century was a time of grief and genocide in Europe, which created a life of anger and despair for those who were affected. Family was so important during the holocaust as it was the only way that someone would be able to handle this time. Elise Wiesel, a survivor of the holocaust, created a work of art with his personal account called Night about his journey during the 1940’s. He uses a plethora of literary devices to convey a theme of strong family bond within his book. During the 1940’s, the Nazi Party in Germany created an era of anti-Semitism and genocide which involved the lives of Jews living in western Europe. During this time in Germany, over 6 million Jews died and only a few lived to tell
The terrors of the Holocaust are unimaginably destructive as described in the book Night by Elie Wiesel. The story of his experience about the Holocaust is one nightmare of a story to hear, about a trek from one’s hometown to an unknown camp of suffering is a journey of pain that none shall forget. Hope and optimism vanished while denial and disbelief changed focus during Wiesel’s journey through Europe. A passionate relationship gradually formed between the father and the son as the story continued. The book Night genuinely demonstrates how the Holocaust can alter one's spirits and relations.
Well first off, Hitler and the Nazis weren’t the first people to treat the Jews poorly; they were just the ones to treat them the worst and the most recent. But up until recent time the Jewish people have always been treated poorly throughout the history of their religion. The Jews have always been like the little guy in school that always gets beat up on. According to the website Why Did Hitler Hate The Jews? Hitler just built upon and used anti-Semitic ideas that already existed from past cultures and societies. The Nazis hatred of the Jews was so different in that they believed that the Jews were biologically and racially distinct, that there was a kind of biological struggle for dominance over the entire human race between the Jews and everybody else (The Nazi Hatred of the Jews). The Nazis singled them out because they thought the Jewish people were pests, the Nazis didn’t even consider them humans, and needed to be eradicated to make the world
Greater than any war, plague, or catastrophe and it’s potential damage to human life is beyond calculation, the feeling of dehumanization is a feeling beyond description. Elie Wiesel a Jew Holocaust survivor from Sighet, Transylvania writes a memoir Night. In his memoir he writes about his own experiences in 1944 during the holocaust. Throughout this story Elie goes through lots of challenges that ultimately challenge his faith as a human. In resemblance, Jakob Blankitny a Jew from Maków Mazowiecki, Poland writes his take on his experiences in 1944 throughout the holocaust and how he and his family are treated by the Nazis and degraded as humans. In dire circumstances, these texts argue that dissolving one into a primitive with savage, animal characteristics are necessary for survival under inhumane conditions.
The Holocaust, yet another unpleasant time in history tainted with the blood and suffering of man. Human beings tortured, executed and starved for hatred and radical ideas. Yet with many tragedies there are survivors, those who refused to die on another man’s command. These victims showed enormous willpower, they overcame human degradation and tragedies that not only pushed their beliefs in god, but their trust in fellow people. It was people like Elie Wiesel author of “Night”, Eva Galler,Sima Gleichgevicht-Wasser, and Solomon Radasky that survived, whose’ mental and physical capabilities were pushed to limits that are difficult to conceive. Each individual experiences were different, but their survival tales not so far-reaching to where the fundamental themes of fear, family, religion and self-preservation played a part in surviving. Although some of these themes weren’t always so useful for survival.
P: The purpose of This interview with blanka Rothschild is to help the researcher learn everything that happened to survivors after the holocaust.This interview shows their life in the concentration camps their lives when they try to return home and then their past up to present day. This shows how the nazis treated the survivors who took who in and the places that survivors fled too.
They believe that we Jews weren’t good enough to
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.
Racial antisemitism was born in the Nineteenth Century when laws were passed in many European countries posing the Jewish people as second-class citizens, not receiving the same rights as others in society. While they had reached a level of religious emancipation in some countries, Judaism had become recognized as an ethnicity as well, and this ethnic difference from the Aryans therefore made them “inferior.” Pogroms began across Eastern Europe in the late 1800’s which resulted in
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.
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
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
They were also demonized, shown as something to be feared and hated. This was potentially more detrimental to the Jewish people than their dehumanization, as shown on page 149. Here Vladek tells Artie “The mothers always told so”Be careful! A Jew will catch you to a bag and eat you!” So they taught to their children” (Spiegelman 149).
Even though childhood has change for the better there is an argument stating that childhood is disappearing “at a dazzling speed” (Postman, 1996) says that there is a closing gap between childhood and adulthood. Neil Postman (1996) claims this in his book “The Disappearance of Childhood”. Postman theory was purely based on the way that communications through technology were made which shapes society today. He thinks that due to the technology such as television and the Internet children nowadays are much likely to have more access to the ‘adult world’, thus childhood to be disappearing (Postman, 1982). He claims its “Frankenstein Syndrome” consequence of the mass media is mainly the responsible for the usage of television, and the social media.