Analysis of Eleanor Ayer’s Parallel Journeys During the Holocaust six million Jews lost their lives, while others lost their friends, family and dignity. Helen Waterford discusses her survival in the novel Parallel Journeys . Through Helen Waterford’s journey to hide, survive, and rejoin society, she realizes that she cannot dwell on what has happened to her but learn and become wise from what she has endured.
In Helen’s lifetime, all she had ever known was that being Jewish was considered the worst thing a person could have been associated with . Helen met a man named Siegfried Wohlfarth, whom she married shortly after despite the uprising struggles of Jews. With logical reasoning, the newlyweds planned to flee the country of Germany for
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With the amount of anti-Semitic activity in Germany, no Jew was safe and Helen realized this quickly. In order to protect her child he had to give her to family to keep her safe. “There we said goodbye as casually as possible and gave these strangers our child.” After this moment, Helen’s fight for survival to see her child once again. Finding a place to hide became very difficult as no one wanted to host a Jewish family due to the fear of the Nazis finding out. “People were understandably nervous and frightened, so the only solution was to find another hiding place.”
After being caught the feeling of defeat struck Helen as she did not know what would happen to her from this point on. Waterford’s husband slowly lost himself on the journey to the camp, “In his way, Siegfried was giving up hope before his time. During the next few nine months, I would see a similar loss of hope among many of my companions.” Helen soon learned that yesterday was the past and life can only be viewed by the hope of a better
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“Picking up the pieces of their shattered lives was very, very difficult, but most survivors found a way to begin again.” Once again, Helen was faced with the struggle of living life day-to-day, trying not to continue feeling the pain of her past.
When in America, Helen found that it was hard not to talk about past and the stories of her imprisonment. “Some survivors found it impossible to talk about their pasts. By staying silent, they hoped to bury the horrible nightmares of the last few years. They wanted to spare their children and those who knew little about the holocaust from listening to their terrible stories.” In the efforts to save people from having to hear about the gruesome past, the survivors also lacked the resources to mentally recovery from the tragedy.
People like Helen’s mother grew tired of the stories she’d try to tell to have her mother understand what happened. Her mother once said “I cannot understand why you always come back with those old stories. Forget those ties and what has happened. Nobody wants to hear or talk about this anymore.” In a way, I feel that Helen’s mother did not mean to sound as brutal as she did to Helen, but rather tried to tell Helen that life has to continue on and she cannot dwell on the pain of the
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness,” Desmond Tutu once said (“Desmond Tutu Quotes”). During the Holocaust, the Jews were treated very badly but some managed to stay hopeful through this horrible time. The book Parallel Journeys by Eleanor Ayer shows how Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck who had two very different stories but managed to stay hopeful. Helen was a Jew who went into hiding for awhile before being taken away from her family and being sent to a concentration camp. Alfons was a member of the Hitler Youth where he became the youngest member of the German air force. To him, Hitler was everything and he would die any day for him and his country. As for Helen, Hitler was the man ruining her life. The Holocaust was horrible to live through but some managed to survive because of the hope they contained.
The Silber Medal winning biography, “Surviving Hitler," written by Andrea Warren paints picture of life for teenagers during the Holocaust, mainly by telling the story of Jack Mandelbaum. Avoiding the use of historical analysis, Warren, along with Mandelbaum’s experiences, explains how Jack, along with a few other Jewish and non-Jewish people survived.
In The book Devil in Vienna, by Doris Orgel, Inge a young, intelligent Jewish girl is faced with the same types of problems. Being Jewish at that time was no small problem. Instead of worrying what to wear the next day, she would have to worry about whether or not her family would be safe or taken to a concentration camp. Inge not only had to face the problem of keeping her family together, she had to find a way to maintain a friendship with her best friend Lieselotte. Lieselotte’s father was a Nazi and forbade her to keep any contact with Inge, but the two girls would always find a way to see or write to each other even when things were rough. Inges father also began to disprove of their friendship and pretty soon if either one were to mention the other’s name she would be punished. Yet the girls refused to forget each other. One day Inge received the news. She was to move away to Yugoslavia to escape Hitler’s regime. The girls promised to never forget each other and they never did; even long after the war was over.
“I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” (Elie Wiesel) The Holocaust is a topic that is still not forgotten and is used by many people, as a motivation, to try not to repeat history. Many lessons can be taught from learning about the Holocaust, but to Eve Bunting and Fred Gross there is one lesson that could have changed the result of this horrible event. The Terrible Things, by Eve Bunting, and The Child of the Holocaust, by Fred Gross, both portray the same moral meaning in their presentations but use different evidence and word choice to create an overall
She allows her mother to control her and make decisions for her. During their conversation, she asks her mom if she should marry Mr. Jones even if she does not love him. Her mother does not seem to care until Helen mentions that he is Vice-President of the company. Her mother says that she should marry him whether she loves him or not because he will be able to take care of her and Helen. They continue to discuss how Helen can marry this man that she doesn’t like so she will never have to work again and he can support her mother, or she can say no at the risk of losing her job and not being able to support her mother anymore. Helen ties in how life is making her “feel like I’m stifling!” (591). Again, I feel this is another representation of Helen not being able to handle the pressures of society. Helen can’t talk about important decisions she has to make without feeling claustrophobic and blowing up by saying things like “I’ll kill you!” (592). I think she blows up because her mother is always nagging her and she can’t handle it in that moment anymore, especially since it is a conversation about
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
Mr. Wiesel had intended this book to describe a period of time in his life that had been dark and sorrowful. This novel is based on a survivor of the greatest Holocaust in history, Eliezer Wiesel and his journey of being a Jew in 1944. The journey had started in Sighet, Transylvania, where Elie spent his childhood. During the Second World War, Germans came to Elie and his family’s home town. They brought with them unnecessary evil and despair to mankind. Shortly after young Elie and thousands of other Jews were forced from their habitats and torn from their rights of being human. They were sent to different concentration camps. Elie and his family were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp. It would be the last time Elie sees his mother and little sister, Tzipora. The first sights of Auschwitz were terrifying. There were big flames coming from the burning of bodies and the crematoriums. The Jews had no idea of what to expect. They were not told what was about to happen to them. During the concentration camp, there was endless death and torture. The Jews were starved and were treated worse than cattle. The prisoners began to question their faith in God, wondering why God himself would
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
To sum up, World War II is the most destructive human endeavor in history. Battles are fought on every continent and involved more than sixty countries, affecting about three-quarters of the world’s population. Six million Jews are murdered by the Nazis from all of the civilians in Europe for extermination. The memory of Holocaust has made the world more sensitive to genocide. The Holocaust has a particular impact on the Jewish people, who vowed never to allow such a thing happen again. The Night and Fugitive Pieces are two impressive books which show readers a fact of Holocaust and tell the world even the situation is worst, love from families and friends, faith and intension of alive may ensure them alive.
The second portion of the semester has had a focus on how the Holocaust has continued to cause devastation and familial conflict even after the war ended. Of the texts we have read, Maus by Art Speigelman and Still Alive by Ruth Kluger were two very different accounts of the Holocaust, however there was one strong continuity between the texts: the effects of the Holocaust were not exclusive to any single person or family, survivors and their offspring continued to suffer long after escaping the camps. The constant tension documented in Maus between Speigelman and his father was not exclusive to their family as Holocaust survivors; Ruth Kluger also incorporates her family struggles into her book by detailing the differences between her and her mother, even after her mother has passed away. Because their experiences differ, with Speigelman being the son of a Holocaust victim and Kluger actually enduring it, the texts took different forms, both linguistically and aesthetically, to communicate their messages of familial conflict.
No one understands such a dreadful experience as the Holocaust without shifting in the way you were before. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author defines his suffering at the hands of Nazis. Taken with his family in 1944, they were directed to Auschwitz to come before the dishonorable selection. There, Elie parted from his mom and sister leaving him with his father who was too busy to spend any time with his son before the camp. Being under the Nazis' control, Elie and his father moved to several camps. The Nazi command “deprived Elie...of the desire to live..., which murdered his God and soul and turned my dreams to dust” (32).
The Holocaust was a terrible time in history; many innocent people were killed, all because of their faith. The book Night by Ellie Wiesel portrays the vigorous journey Wiesel and his family undergo throughout this torturous time. The holocaust wasn’t just genocide against the Jews; it was also a long process of dehumanizing them too. Their valuables were taken and their heads were shaved stripping them of their identity.
In the Holocaust millions of Jews lost their lives because of simply who they were. Many however hid and survived this dark event in history. It was the year 1933 and WW11 roared on, some saw it as a war against countries but eventually everything dark and ugly came to the light. Adolf Hitler was the chancellor of Germany and had obtained great popularity with the German people. While beginning to attack nations he was also trying to destroy all Jews in a horrific mass genocide. Creating concentration camps and taking all that the Jews owned he began to round up these human beings as if they were cattle. The stories account for them as being kidnapped at midnight to being tricked into going to their death thinking they were going for a better life. Not all stories ended in despair, there were many who managed to outsmart the Nazis and their allies. Many hid from them, blended in or fled to safe countries. Even under all the pain and horror many prevailed and won the prize of life. People, no matter who will fight to live no matter what the circumstance. These are the stories of those fortunate survivors who hid, fled, lived to tell their perilous account of the holocaust.
The Holocaust continues to exist as a black mark in the history of Germany; through the government supported torture and extermination of both men and women, more than 6 million lost their lives. As a consequence of the collective tragedy for both sexes, there has been much debate pertaining to the focus of gender specific suffering in Holocaust literature; for this reason, the Holocaust accounts of women writers were largely ignored prior to the 1970’s. Many historians still refute disparities existed between the male and female experience. However, it is worth noting that the social, familial, and cultural expectations of men and women, both prior to and during the war, varied greatly. Moreover, these diverging roles promoted distinctively different coping, processing, and accounting of the tragedies stemming from the Holocaust. By examining the unique experiences of women, both within and outside the concentration camps, one can logically conclude these remarkable accounts broaden the scope of Holocaust literature. Embedded gender roles helped the survival efforts of women, and these unique female perspectives are valuable in accurately portraying the Holocaust experience.
The imagination and the ability to empathize with others is the key to living a wider life, a key to escaping the prison of a limited self. But, imagination and identification are also menacing. As we read and listen to the words of survivors, as we study the Holocaust from all points of view, our imaginations threaten us. As I pick up Elie Wiesel's novel Night, I take the Holocaust in my hands, and I hear children's' voices in the dark. I am afraid for them and for myself. First, I am afraid my imagination will fail me, and I will be overwhelmed. The terror and humiliation of the Holocaust may so numb me that I will go into "shock." I will isolate myself, deny everything -- suffering, empathy, mercy, family, God. I will experience what Wiesel experienced when his father was struck and he did nothing (36-37), or, in the end, I will abandon my father. Wiesel says to me, "I awoke on January 29 at dawn. In my father's place lay another invalid. They must have taken him away before dawn an...