Analysis Of Zusak's Passage From 'The Book Thief'

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Recommended: Essays of the holocaust

Both Zusak and Kimmelman try to convey to you the horrors of not just the Holocaust but WWII in general. Horrors that include the persecution of Jews, the use of showers, the war, hundreds of thousands dead from most involved countries, and countless more that they didn't describe. When you begin to read Zusak’s passage from The Book Thief you can tell that he gets very poetic and symbolic, most things from his passage are non-literal. Why do I think this? Well, when he uses phrases like these: “- that death waits for no man - and if he does, he doesn't usually wait very long.”, I think this is one of literature's best quotes. Zusak is basically saying that death is inevitable, no one is here forever. Everything will die in the end, so if you think about it nothing really matters. …show more content…

Minute after minute. Shower after shower.” But over all, these last two quotes are the ones that gave me chills; in my opinion no author can sum up the horrors of the Holocaust better than Zusak. Well, you can see how Zusak (from what I’ve read about WWII). As you have seen Zusak uses lots of figure of speech and non-literal phrasing to paint a picture of life in WWII Germany. On the other hand, Kimmelman takes a more traditional route when writing “Auschwitz Shifts from Memorializing to Teaching”, but it's still a great piece of work. Overall what Kimmelman is trying to say in his passage is that we need to find a new way to retell WWII because like he said,”…in a different way for a different age” and “...the legacy of this camp insists that Auschwitz needs and update.” He’s trying to find a way to retell the story of WWII to modern day people, to show them what might happen if we don’t learn from our mistakes. KImmelman also goes into detail describing death camps like Auschwitz, “It now enfolds unadorned and mostly unexplained, in the display of hair, shoes and other remains of the dead”. What do they both

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