A Tree Grows In Brooklyn Analysis

Survival Innocence proved itself important by distinguishing the intense difference between hope and pessimism in the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and in the memoir All but My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein. From the moment Francie Nolan and Gerda Weissmann were born, there was a twinkle of hope in both of their eyes. They spent their days dreaming and wondering what the world was like outside of Francie’s hometown Brooklyn, and Gerda’s hometown Bielitz. The two girls possessed carefree childhoods with their families and were loved deeply by them. The older Francie and Gerda had grown, the clearer the world had become to them. All of the cruelty that was once hidden had become visible which led their innocence to develop into

The SS men who were at her last camp, Grünberg, had ordered the 1,000 girls there to begin marching with the other 3,000 girls who had just arrived there. No one knew where they were headed or how long they would be walking. Gerda was still with her friend Ilse and now two other girls she had met in previous camps. They stayed strong during most of the war but the march appeared to push them closer to death. Gerda still hoped they would live through it and be free but Ilse was slowly dying. They had to sleep in the snow with whatever clothing they had on before they left Grünberg. When Ilse finally passed away, Gerda felt alone. Her other two friends were also slowly dying from hypothermia. She had no inkling when they were going to stop or if she was going to live, but the sound of artillery fire gave her the ounce of hope she needed to keep trudging through the snow. Eventually trucks had come to take the few living girls to death camps. The Nazis knew the war would be over in a matter of days and wanted to slaughter as many Jews as they could before then. The first truck that left was supposed to return to pick up Gerda and a few other girls, but was strafed by an American plane and never came back. Gerda waited for the truck until all of the remaining girls were herded into a factory that was intended to blow up. Gerda was devastated that she had hoped all those years she would be free again and was now going to die. As Gerda’s luck would have it, Czechs from the town they were in rushed inside and told the girls to run. That factory never blew up because the bomb placed by the Nazis never went off. Gerda survived the Holocaust because she believed she would be free again and she finally