The Holocaust In Todd Strasser's Novel The Wave

Throughout world history, many manifestations occurred which led to horrific demeanors. In 1981, Todd Strasser wrote a fictionalized novel known as The Wave, based on a real life event about an experiment. This experiment, conducted in 1969 by Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California, proves how effortlessly fascism can corrupt people. This experiment begins with a student’s question about the Holocaust which Jones cannot answer. The Holocaust was a horrific event that occurred from 1933 to 1945. This atrocity was initiated by Adolf Hitler, who tortured and murdered over eleven million Jewish people in extermination camps.

Anxiety washed over the poor boy. It was dark, darker than Zerdek had ever know. With each second that passed, a low mumble could be heard from the corner. Something or someone else was here with him. Wherever here was. He shut his eyes thinking about the light. Thinking about anything that would make it seem like he was back at home. Home. He tried to remember the faces. He tried to remember each of the tree top building. Yet it was a blur. Everything that had happen with-in the last few hours, day, months was a giant blur from him. He had no concept of time. A click came from afar, as light came barreling in. Zerdek let out a low growl as he covered his eyes, unable to adjust to the light quickly enough. Arms reached out and pulled to two

The Holocaust appeared to be a time of darkness and it seemed like on Earth and in heaven, each doorway of humanity, empathy, and kindness had been closed down. Those who did not encounter the Holocaust cannot begin to comprehend what it was like, however, those who did cannot begin to express it. Torture, genocide, and cruel acts started to fill brains and souls. The Holocaust was an event where millions of people were being murdered during World War II. The memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel is based on Wiesel’s experiences in concentration camps, in order to give readers an insight of someone who was a victim of the Holocaust. The young narrator, Elie Wiesel, faces countless struggles for survival among the horrors of the Holocaust. In the memoir, Eliezer, the passionately, devoted boy with a benevolent family, is taken from his home and sent to a concentration camp. Through their unstable and dangerous journey, Elie is detached from his mother and sisters but lingers on with his father, only to be relocated from camp to camp. Elie mentions the death of numerous family members, the death of his own identity and innocence, to an extent in which living or dying did not matter anymore. In Night, Wiesel reveals that the exposure to an unsympathetic, bitter world generates to the destruction of the three main themes throughout the memoir which are; religious faith, identity, and family.

Nonna Bannister, born September 22, 1925 in Taganrog, Russia and died August 15, 2004 in Tennessee, united states. Nonna bannister was well known for her auto biography of The Secret Holocaust Dairies: The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister.

Although Holocaust literature focuses on a specific period in world history, it also contains some common themes and symbols that help to define this era. The butterfly, for instance, is a symbol for the ephemeral lives of Holocaust children. A child, Pavel Friedman, wrote a poem titled "The Butterfly" during his time in a concentration camp. Since then, the butterfly has been a Holocaust theme for the large number of children who did not survive. A book,I Never Saw Another Butterfly, compiled by Inge Auerbacher, a Holocaust survivor at Terezín, features artwork, poems (including Friedman's poem), and words from many of the young children who died inside Terezín's walls. Patricia Polacco'sThe Butterfly also connects to this symbol as a butterfly gets crushed in a fist, helping show young children the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust in ways that could easily be understood.

ways that collective memories develop, eventually concluding that the Holocaust was not a collective memory. In his argument, he gives three different definitions of a collective memory. He then explains how Americans do not meet these definitions based on geographical location, and not experiencing it first-hand. The author is trying to get across that even though the Holocaust is discussed a lot in various contexts, it is not defined as a collective memory for Americans. The Holocaust was as Novick suggests “cost-free” for Americans, meaning they did not lose anything. Germans were directly affected by this historical

Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor's Tale is a graphic novel which portrays the horror of the Holocaust through the use of animals. The mice are the narrators, representing the oppressed Jews while the cats represent the Nazis. This story is told as a first-person narrative, explaining in depth the horrors lived by Vladek, a Polish Jew reliving his tale by sharing his story with his son, Artie. Spiegelman uses this novel to tell his own life story as a Holocaust survivor. Unlike his father, he may not have lived through the horrors the Nazis have brought to the Jews, but he had to grow up and live with the psychological effects and the trauma this had on his father. Indeed, the novel begins with a prologue which is a memory Artie recounts from

“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt this broadcast with the news that the German army has reached Kraków.” pg. 5

Peter Longerich's Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews is a recent contribution to the contemporary scholarly literature on the subject. The book was originally published in 1998 in German, under the title Politik der Vernichtung, Politics of Destruction. This 2010 English-language release is, as the author claims, shorter in some areas and longer in others. The primary additions include a chapter on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic, which adds considerable meat to the contextual evidence that Longerich includes in his history of the Holocaust. Moreover, the author draws on the release of new primary source data from the archives in Warsaw and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, which have only recently been revealed, archived, and cataloged.

Everybody had a different perspective on the Jews. One perspective is, Hitler believed the Jews were horrible. He had also explained and convinced this to the Nazis by saying they were “back stabbing” people. For example, the text Adolf Hitler and Mein Kampf Excerpt from Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust” it states “..Germany had lost World War I through a “stab in the back” from its own government, which had allied itself with Jews. The Jews had so weakened the government that it had lost the will and the strength to fight.” The quote goes the show why Hitler and the Nazis have a hatred for the Jews. They explain and infer that they only reason why the Germans had lost World War 1 is because the Jews allied themselves with

After WW1 Germany had to pay reparations to the allies, During this time Hitler blamed the Jews for the hardship that came to Germany. The Holocaust started in 1993 Nazi Occupied Germany to 1945 Germany. The Holocaust took place during the years 1933-1945 during that time German Citizens wanted something to believe something to help them get out of this hardship and Hitler was a very successful talker he managed to convince that war will help them get out of the pain after successfully invading parts of Europe he felt invincible and decided that the Jews needed to be taught a lesson. In technicality Hitler did not kill but he gave the order to his elite police the Waffen SS, The Waffen SS is the Nazi partys armed division.

Flight 407 was the plane I was on. I was flying with my friends Leo, Dakota, Mark and myself of course. We all boarded the plane. 407 it was a private plane that Leo’s Dad owns. We were all going to Porte Margi for a hunting trip, hoping to catch bore. Mark Brought some food, Leo brought a hunting knife kit, Dakota brought a fire starter, and I brought a survival kit. We have been flying at least 22 hours, It’s really been nothing but steady air “ guys look! there's a flock of parrots. As they were flying the parrots weren't moving out of the plane's direction, suddenly the plane shifted left as if it was in an air show,

In The Wave Ben Ross thought that trying an experiment with his students, would help them learn about what happened during the Holocaust. This ended up failing for the reason of everyone taking it way too far. For example, Robert Billings thought that Mr. Ross should

The students did not understand why the German people followed Adolf Hitler. The teacher, Ben Ross, made an experiment called “The Wave” which showed how the Nazis controlled the German people. The theme “Following the crowd is not always right” has a huge effect in the story and is the main point of the book. The people in the school followed the crowd , the Wave, and if someone did not follow, they were bullied. “The whole idea of The Wave is that the people in it have to support it.

Mr. Jones wasn’t happy with what he had done most likely because it went a little too far and it might have made students feel bad afterwards. This was because The Wave was so much similar to Nazis. He wanted to use The Wave as a lesson because a student had asked, “Why didn’t someone try and stop Hitler, because it was obvious he was murdering the Jews?” Mr. Jones used the same technique to trick the students into thinking they were apart of something big.