Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic, and Peter L. Fischl’s “To The Little Polish Boy Standing With His Arms Up,” each describe with certain tools and tones to represent specific ideas from World War II. Informing us of the alienating actions, both authors discuss Jews controlled by the Nazis and the pain injected from living in the concentration camps. The Devil’s Arithmetic speaks to direct acknowledgement, and uses real people and emotion to show the intense pain Jewish humans endured during this period of time. Contrastingly, “Little Polish Boy Standing With His Arms Up” honors some but the ignorance shown by growing anger and disgust displays how terrifying it was during this war. Using capitalization, repetition, strong vocabulary, and a ramping pace, Fischl presents an empowering poem of World War II. In The Devil’s Arithmetic, Jane Yolen uses many tools and tones to suggest her feelings on the war. She uses her personal experiences, as she is Jewish and has Jewish family that was tortured by the Nazis. Her tones depict the foolish people who don’t acknowledge that this ever happened, and it honors those who lived in the death camps and especially those who lived. Along with that, she uses perfect words and repeated strong facts after …show more content…
strong facts to help get the understanding of her thoughts. These vital parts create imagery with impeccable figurative speech that puts together a fully enforced idea on this monstrous world event. “To The Little Polish Boy Standing With His Arms Up,” talks with repetivity and growing ire.
This is to the respect of upstanders and shame of those bystanders who fell to the Nazi’s wrath. This passionate poem has many key factors that gives it off such a powerful aura. Fischl uses capitalization of certain words to emphasize their meaning and value in the writing. Lines are also repeated multiple times throughout the poem to show how they are influential and important to the situation. Many strong words are put in together with the uprising pace of the author, as his rage comes out while going through this piece of literature. Compressed, he is upset with the bystanders who just witnessed the events and did nothing about
it. The devastating impact that this worldwide event had was all witnessed through torture and the apocalyptic actions used during this time. These authors spoke with many tools and tones to perfectly express their stories and experiences. Both informing us of this major tragedy, these thought inducing stories each go down their separate paths of using techniques to display how this horrible event was in their mind. Through real humans and emotion, Yolen captures our brain using her personal experiences and facts. On the other hand, Fischl, using strong vocabulary, repetition, and capitalization, honors those upstanders during the war, but feels disgraced by those who ignored these dreadful facts. Driving up in fury, Peter L. Fischl expresses his input on this world catastrophe.
My book The Devil's Arithmetic By Jane Yolen is about a girl named Hannah stern who is a young Jewish girl living in New Rochelle, NY. She and her family, including her parents and younger brother Aaron are to in a Seder at her grandparent's home. Hannah does not want to be at the seder. She is tired of hearing about the past and is uncomfortable listening to her Grandpa Will talk about his experiences in the concentration camp."
The Book Thief and The Devil’s Arithmetic both focus on the prejudice Hitler had on different types of people during World War II. Liesel and Hannah both lost someone they had dearly loved. Liesel lost Rudy and Hannah lost many members of her family. In a time of fearfulness, both had told stories to the people surrounding them. Although both were not seen as equal in the eyes of many during their time, I see them as courageous and brave heroes after what they underwent.
More than 12,000 children below the age of 15 proceeded through the Terezin Concentration Camp, known by its German name of Theresienstadt, between the years 1942 and 1944. Out of all, more than 90 percent deceased during the Holocaust. To add on, Jewish children wrote poetry about their horrific experiences they went through in Nazi concentration camps. Additionally, the poet’s word choice produces the narrator’s point of view. For example, in the poem The Butterfly, it states, “It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye” (stanza 2). In other words, Pavel Friedmann, poet, uses first-person point of view, so the narrator can be the main person in the poem by saying things from his/her perspective. From this, we can infer that the poet’s word choice in a way puts the narrator into their feet, in order for him/her to have a feeling as if they’re the one confronting this harsh obstacle in life like the poet had to challenge with.
It is interesting to read the connections of Night, by Elie Wiesel because they include the experiences of the Holocaust from other people's’ points of views. In A Spring Morning, by Ida Fink, it is shocking that the innocence has been stripped away from the child as the speaker reveals, “Fire years old! The age for teddy bears and blocks” (Wiesel 129). This child is born innocent, she has not harmed anyone, yet she has to suffer. Reading about the Holocaust is difficult, I wonder how others had the motivation to live during it. The description of a little girl getting shot is heartbreaking as the speaker explains, “At the edge of the sidewalk lay a small, bloody rag…. He [Aron] had to keep on walking, carrying his dead child” (Wiesel 133).
In Elie Wiesel’s Night, he recounts his horrifying experiences as a Jewish boy under Nazi control. His words are strong and his message clear. Wiesel uses themes such as hunger and death to vividly display his days during World War II. Wiesel’s main purpose is to describe to the reader the horrifying scenes and feelings he suffered through as a repressed Jew. His tone and diction are powerful for this subject and envelope the reader. Young readers today find the actions of Nazis almost unimaginable. This book more than sufficiently portrays the era in the words of a victim himself.
A story of a young boy and his father as they are stolen from their home in Transylvania and taken through the most brutal event in human history describes the setting. This boy not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce literature, in order to better educate society on the truth of the Holocaust. In Night, the author, Elie Wiesel, uses imagery, diction, and foreshadowing to describe and define the inhumanity he experienced during the Holocaust.
Most historical events, whether beneficial or detrimental to society, bear witnesses. Regardless of how many total were affected by the event, each person owns a personal account of what they endured during the event. Elie Wiesel, author of Night, expresses the personal account of Elizer, a Jewish teenager, who fought to stay alive during the holocaust, and shows the importance of witness accounts, the will to survive, and the remembrance of past historical events. Night encompasses the idea of “Literature of Witness” by simultaneously showing how millions of people were affected by the holocaust and how each person, principally Elizer, has their own personal story to tell to understand and remember that horrendous time.
Along with rhetorical appeals, Wiesel also uses many rhetorical devices such as parallelism and anaphora. Wiesel depicts parallelism when he says, “to fight fascism, to fight dictatorship, to fight Hitler” (Wiesel lines 103-104). The parallelism and anaphora, in the quote, provide emphasis on the discrimination and abuse that has taken place around the world. Repeating the same initial phrase shows the significance of the words Wiesel is speaking. Wiesel mentions the victims of this extreme tragedy when he states,” for the children in the world, for the homeless for the victims of injustice, the victims of destiny and society.” (Wiesel lines 17-19). This use of anaphora and parallelism emphasize the amount of people the Holocaust has affected and impacted. The parallelism being used adds value to his opinions and balances the list of people Wiesel is making in his speech.
Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, is an account about his experience through concentration camps and death marches during WWII. In 1944, fifteen year old Wiesel was one of the many Jews forced onto cattle cars and sent to death and labor camps. Their personal rights were taken from them, as they were treated like animals. Millions of men, women, children, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled people, and Slavic people had to face the horrors the Nazi’s had planned for them. Many people witnessed and lived through beatings, murders, and humiliations. Throughout the memoir, Wiesel demonstrates how oppression and dehumanization can affect one’s identity by describing the actions of the Nazis and how it changed the Jewish
Many themes exist in Night, Elie Wiesel’s nightmarish story of his Holocaust experience. From normal life in a small town to physical abuse in concentration camps, Night chronicles the journey of Wiesel’s teenage years. Neither Wiesel nor any of the Jews in Sighet could have imagined the horrors that would befall them as their lived changed under the Nazi regime. The Jews all lived peaceful, civilized lives before German occupation. Eliezer Wiesel was concerned with mysticism and his father was “more involved with the welfare of others than with that of his own kin” (4). This would change in the coming weeks, as Jews are segregated, sent to camps, and both physically and emotionally abused. These changes and abuse would dehumanize men and cause them to revert to basic instincts. Wiesel and his peers devolve from civilized human beings to savage animals during the course of Night.
A Lucky Child by Thomas Buergenthal is a memoir about his time as a Jewish child in multiple ghettos and death camps in and around Germany during World War II. The author shares about his reunions with family and acquaintances from the war in the years between then and now. Buergenthal wished to share his Holocaust story for a number of reasons: to prevent himself from just being another number, to contribute to history, to show the power and necessity of forgiveness, the will to not give up, and to question how people change in war allowing them to do unspeakable things. The memoir is not a cry for private attention, but a call to break the cycle of hatred and violence to end mass crimes.
In this tiny novel, you will get to walk right into a gruesome nightmare. If only then, it was just a dream. You would witness and feel for yourself of what it is like to go through the unforgettable journey that young Eliezer Wiesel and his father had endured in the greatest concentration camp that shook the history of the entire world. With only one voice, Eliezer Wiesel’s, this novel has been told no better. Elie's voice will have you emotionally torn apart. The story has me questioning my own wonders of how humanity could be mistreated in such great depths and with no help offered.
Imagine waking up on a normal day, in your normal house, in your normal room. Imagine if you knew that that day, you would be taken away from your normal life, and forced to a life of death, sickness, and violence. Imagine seeing your parents taken away from you. Imagine watching your family walk into their certain death. Imagine being a survivor. Just think of the nightmares that linger in your mind. You are stuck with emotional pain gnawing at your sanity. These scenerios are just some of the horrific things that went on between 1933-1945, the time of the Holocaust. This tragic and terrifying event has been written about many times. However, this is about one particularly fascinating story called The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.
For example in the novel it states,”.....Programmed misery, such a routine of torture, all couched in a language of manufacture.” This exemplifies that the Nazis are demoralizing and torturing the Jews. While the Jews are trying to defend themselves but their was no way to. In the text Yolen portrays, “not to lift a hand against the Germans had become the quiet passive heroism of the common Jew. That heroism- to resit be dehumanized, to simplify out live one tormentors, to practice the quiet, everyday caring for one's equally tormented neighbors. To witness. To remember. These were the only victories of the camps.” On the other hand, the Nazis will never get rid of the spirit in their hearts even if they are getting torn apart. With the author's respectful tone it sets a mood of enragement because of all the wicked Nazis and what they did to the
This memoir, which sits on the library shelf, dusty and unread, gives readers a view of the reality of this brutal war. So many times World War II books give detail about the war or what went on inside the Concentration Camps, yet this book gives insight to a different side. A side where a child not only had to hide from Nazi’s in threat of being taken as a Jew, but a child who hid from the Nazi’s in plain sight, threatened every day by his identity. Yeahuda captures the image of what life was like from the inside looking out. “Many times throughout the war we felt alone and trapped. We felt abandoned by all outside help. Like we were fighting a war on our own” (Nir 186). Different from many non-fiction books, Nir uses detail to give his story a bit of mystery and adventure. Readers are faced with his true battles and are left on the edge of their