Zookeeper's Wife Quotes

After the attacks, Dorotha and Wladyslaw become best friends and they go and get some coffee. When they get to the coffee shop, the door said “NO JEWS ALLOWED”. They go to sit together to the park “NO JEWS ALLOWED”. The Germans have established rules in Warsaw. After that, the Nazi’s force all Jewish people to go to the Warsaw ghetto in 1939.

Day by day the Nazi’s would come and take people off the streets and they would disappear and never return. Adolf Hitler had been in power and declared that Europe would be Jew free. From this point on, Yanek and the rest of the Jewish population in Europe had been hiding, in fear of the Nazi’s.

Larson, Erik. In the garden of beasts: love, terror, and an American family in Hitlers Berlin. 375 pages. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2011.

The movie Kanal presents a very realistic and factual representation of the Warsaw Uprising that took place in 1944. The main goal for the Polish resisters was to push the Nazi Germans out of Warsaw and help fight against other Axis Powers. However, the resisters’ plan was very unsuccessful, and subsequently, 200,000 Polish citizens were killed. In the movie, the resisters were characterized as low-level officers who didn’t have much

It happened because of the killing of a German officer, Ernst vom Rath by for a Polish Jew called Herschel Gynszpan (Moeller 105). I witnessed the frightful attack by the Nazis on places related to the Jews such as synagogues, their religious sites, and cemeteries (Bergen “Chapter 5”). All their shops’ windows had been smashed broken. The once graceful streets filled with shops have now been replaced by burned debris and fractures of broken glasses. The Nazis did not only attack their shops and dwellings, but they had also arrested and even murder huge number of Jews (Bergen “Chapter 5”). I saw a young girl being hurled down from a building. I wanted to help her but my timidity had locked both my feet on the ground. An owner of a shop had also been captured by the Stormtroopers, which separated him from his crying wife and daughter. At the sight of this, I thought of Bauer and became frightened for his condition. I leaped to his store, only to find an abandoned and distorted place. Fire has consumed Bauer’s shop, shelf was overthrown, glasses were shattered into pieces, and the safety of Bauer is the only one that I can hope for. When will this violence end? It saddens me to know that Germany is no longer the country it used to be, for racialism has covered it, and ‘unity’ has lost its

In the short story “The Key Game” the author appeals to the readers’ sense of emotion (pathos) because of the in-depth description of the Jewish family’s unfortunate living arrangements, and because of the method the author uses to explain the various character descriptions, emotions, and dialog throughout the story. This story takes place at some point during the Second World War. The author, Ida Fink, introduces the reader to a small Jewish family consisting of a wife, husband, and their three year old son. They live in a small apartment which she describes as poor, urban, and gloomy. The situation with the war can be shown with the frequent changes in apartments. The purpose of the story is in a “game” made by the parents to prepare the child for his reaction in case the Germans ever come knocking at the door. The author introduces the emotion in this story from the very beginning, when she starts to describe where the story takes place.

Prior to the onset of WWII, conditions throughout occupied Poland & Belarus varied greatly. In some areas, especially in eastern Poland, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1939, and subsequently "formally" annexed, the situation was particularly volatile.1

In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, a series of increasingly repressive measures are passed, and the Jews of Eliezer’s town are forced into small ghettos within Sighet. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the gateway to Auschwitz.

One day, word went around the neighborhoods that they would be transported. People started to worry. No one knew where they were going. Rumors spread about going to Hungary to work in the “brick factories” there. People began to pack all they could. When the day came for people to start leaving people had to leave their belonging behind that they couldn’t carry. The streets were full of the things that had to be left behind. They were forced to leave pieces of themselves behind. Memories, Valuables, and everything else that help make them human. Homes were abandoned, left open like an old deserted warehouse. The ghettos started to resemble graveyards. Full of the ghost of who they once were. Taking away the objects that were most important to them helped to dehumanize them by taking away the things that represented their lives as humans.

When people think of the word ghetto today they think of an impoverished area of a city. The ghettos of World War II have a similar but nonetheless different definition. The ghettos of World War II were small parts of cities sectioned off to keep Jews in a confined area before eventual extermination. The Jews held there were more than just impoverished like today’s residents of ghettos. They were starved, beaten, and overworked. Ghettos were seen as just a step to Hitler’s final solution, or the extermination of Jews from Nazi occupied territory. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Nazi occupied Europe. It held 400,000 Jews in 1.3 square miles. From the Warsaw Ghetto only 11,500 Jews survived. The Warsaw Ghetto was a place that

We were living among Jews, among brothers…” (Wiesel 9). The communities of Jews were no longer afraid of what could happen, for they thought that the ghettos would be an end, and chose to look at it as if they were staying with a whole family of Jews. Once deportation began, the Hungarian police began acting more brutal towards the

Primo Levi once said, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” Levi, a survivor of the Holocaust, attempted to paint a picture of true evil in this statement, humankind. By taking a deeper look at Night by Elie Wiesel, readers catch a glimpse of what took place in what is now Romania during World War II. The Holocaust is vividly painted for readers young and old so that they may somehow grasp the magnitude of the horrors that took place during this time period. Unfortunately, people cannot truly understand the enormity of what took place because they did not experience it for themselves.

During the ghettoization process of the Holocaust, the constant mistreatment received from authoritarian figures wore down the spirit of the Jews. After having their citizenship revoked as a result of the Nuremberg laws, the Jews were susceptible to physical, emotional, and psychological harassment and abuse. In Elie Wiesel’s case, a majority of the pain inflicted on him and his community was conducted by the Hungarian police. By being segregated into ghettos -- and at the end of constant abuse -- the Jew’s spirits were defeated and they had their hope whittled down to nothingness. In his book, “Night”, towards the end of living in the ghetto, Wiesel details how “weariness had settled into our veins, our limbs, our brains, like molten lead” (Wiesel 16).

It is called “When 300 Jews escaped the Nazi camps by hiding in the Warsaw Zoo” written by Cnaan Liphshiz. The article goes into detail about how a Holocaust survivor recalls what it was like when him and his family had hid in the Warsaw Zoo to get away from Hitler and the concentration camps. He states, “The risk was enormous, but my parents knew that our only chance of survival was getting to that zoo.” He explains how the people who worked and lived there had taught them different codes based on what was safe or not and how these people had showed him that it takes courage to stand up for what one believes in. He recalls how Jan Zabinski had a powerful feel about him, while his wife Antonia was a cheerful and helpful person. She taught the children different musical tones to represent danger and when the danger was over. She also dyed the kids hair to help hide their naturally black hair. He says that during this period, that he can’t remember having any pain or suffering. He says that the people wanted to help as many people as they could, and by doing this, it showed how it took courage to do what they thought was

Rachel Roth had told us about her part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Jews infamous fight against the Nazis. This was not the same story we heard from Andrzej Wiczynski, who was a veteran in the Polish Warsaw Uprising. His story was full of “killing Nazis” and taking back Warsaw. There was no mention of Jews, or the Warsaw Ghetto until prompted by one of the students from the class and the professor. His silence speaks volumes and seems to be a theme throughout