In the article, “Life is Sweet: Baker, 90, Recalls how his Strudel Helped him Survive WWII”, by the Los Angeles Times tells a touching story of a man who survived WWII in the most bizarre fashion. Becoming a pastry chef during the war, saved the life of this baker. Ernie Feld has used the same recipes for decades. His most famous creation was the poppy-seed strudel. And believe it or not, it had actually spared his life once before. The article reads, “Feld used to make poppy-seed strudels for the Nazi SS officers who held him captive during the final years of World War II. As the officers' baker, Feld was able to survive the mass killings that took the lives of millions of other European Jews.” He, himself admits that ““The German SS needed
me because I could cook. Baking saved my life. If I wasn’t a baker, I’d probably be dead.” Feld was born in Czechoslovakia in 1925 and grew up in Europe as wars erupted left and right. Unfortunately, most of his family were killed by the Nazi’s in these wars. When Feld was young, he took a particular interest in baking because of his mother. Feld worked as an assistant baker and took cooking classes. Little did he know that his occupation would soon come in handy. In 1942, Feld was only 17 when he was sent to a concentration camp. He was sent off to Hungary where he worked as a cook. “Then a Nazi SS leader, in need of a good chef for an officer’s club... heard about the Jewish baker-turned-prisoner. “He asked me, ‘What can you cook?’" Feld remembered.” From that encounter, he was chosen as their personal chef. “Feld's cooking made him popular enough with the Nazis that they kept him in the kitchen rather than sending him outside to perform hard labor.” He certainly must’ve felt like the luckiest man alive, though he was still in a dire situation. In 1945, Feld was able to escape with the help of allies and Russian troops pressing in on the Germans. He created a new life for himself by moving to the San Francisco Bay Area and furthered his baking career. Feld married a lovely woman named Marika, and the two both live out their lives baking together. Today, he owns a tiny pastry shop near Lake Tahoe in Nevada.
• Baker General Ludwig was able to provide each man with a pound of bread per day
Bread in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel is sometimes a symbol for relief. A symbol for a time where Elie, his father, and other prisoners had a time of rest in the harsh conditions. On page 73 Elie and his father have a huge sense of relief it says “So? Did you pass? Yes, And you? Also.” “We were able to breathe again. My father had a present for me: A half ration of bread.” Elie and his father passed the selection meaning that they still have a chance to live and survive. Before they saw each other after the selection they had no idea if they would ever see each other ever again, but when they found out that they both made it all that worry and stress went
Nearly everyone has heard the expression, “this is the best thing since sliced bread,” or something similar, but how the expression came to be is an interesting story about Otto Rohwedder and his invention less that a century ago. The invention of sliced bread has had several impacts on the world, including economic, cultural, and sociological. The revolutionary design was even banned for a short period of time during WWII, but not before people gained a dependance for the nicely cut slices.
World War II was a war that took many lives from civilians that deserved to have a life of their own. They were ordinary people who were victims from a horrible and lengthy war that brought out the worst in some people. In Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Levi gives a detailed account of his life in a concentration camp. Primo Levi was a young Italian chemist who was only twenty-four years old when he was captured by the Nazis in 1943. He spent two long and torturous years at Auschwitz before the Russian army freed the remaining prisoners of the camp. He tells about life inside the camp and how tough it was to be held like an animal for so long. He says they were treated as inhumanly as possible while many others in the camp would end up dying from either starvation or being killed. They had to do work that was very strenuous while they had no energy and had to sleep in quarters that resembled packed rat cages. With all of this, Levi describes the complex social system that develops and what it takes to survive. The soc...
In the essay Why Happiness, Why Now? Sara Ahmed talks about how one’s goal in life is to find happiness. Ahmed begins her essay with skepticism and her disbeliefs in happiness. She shows her interest in how happiness is linked to a person’s life choices. Ahmed also tries to dig deeper, and instead of asking an unanswerable question, “what is Happiness?” she asks questions about the role of happiness in one’s life.
Food is essential to basic life. It provides people with the energy to think, speak, walk, talk, and breathe. In preparation for the Jews deportation from the ghettos of Transylvania, “the (Jewish) women were busy cooking eggs, roasting meat, and baking cakes”(Wiesel, 13). The Jewish families realized how crucial food was to their lives even before they were faced with the daily condition of famine and death in the concentration camps. The need for food was increased dramatically with the introduction of the famine-like conditions of the camps. Wiesel admitted that, although he was incredibly hungry, he had refused to eat the plate of thick soup they served to the prisoners on the first day of camp because of his nature of being a “spoiled child”. But his attitude changed rapidly as he began to realize that his life span was going to be cut short if he continued to refuse to eat the food they served him. “By the third day, I (Elie Wiesel) was eating any kind of soup hungrily” (Wiesel, 40). His desire to live superseded his social characteristic of being “pampered”. Remarque also uses his characters to show to how a balanced diet promotes a person’s good health. Paul Bäumer uses food to encourage Franz Kemmerich, his sick friend, “eat decently and you’ll soon be well again…Eating is the main thing” (Remarque, 30). Paul Bäumer feels that good food can heal all afflictions. The bread supply of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front was severely threatened when the rats became more and more numerous.
“I now walk into the wild” (3). It was April 1992 a young man from a rather wealthy family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness. His name was Christopher McCandless. He gave all of his savings to a charity, abandoned his car in the desert, left all his possessions, burned his money and wallet, and invented an alter ego all to shun society. Four months after his adventure, his decomposing body was found in bus 142 by a moose hunter. Into the Wild is a riveting novel about one man’s journey to find himself and live as an individual. Although, Chris McCandless may come as an ill-prepared idiot, his reasons for leaving society are rational. He wanted to leave the conformist society and blossom into his own person, he wanted to create his own story not have his story written for him, and he wanted to be happy not the world’s form of happiness.
Are you more of a glass half-empty type of person or a glass half-full? In the essay “Happiness is a glass half empty” writer Oliver Burkeman would say he is a glass half empty type of person. In his essay he writes, “Be positive, look on the bright side, stay focused on success: so goes our modern mantra. But perhaps the true path to contentment is to learn to be a loser” (Burkeman). I think what he means in this statement is people nowadays are taught to always look on the brighter side of life. When in actuality people should be looking on the negative side of life to realize how great their lives really are. In this essay writer Oliver Burkeman uses rhetorical devices such ethos, pathos, and logos to prove that maybe being negative
The philosophical text “The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters”, by Thomas Hurka illustrates the three key aspects of a good life and well-being; ethical hedonism, desire satisfaction, and objectivism. Ethical hedonism describes how something is intrinsically good for you if it’s a state of pleasure, your well-being improves when you experience pleasure. Desire satisfaction defines how something is intrinsically good for you if you intrinsically desire it, your well-being improves when you satisfy an intrinsic desire. Objectivism is about how some things are intrinsically good for you independently of any desire you may have or any pleasure you may get, your well-being improves when you acquire those things. Hurka believes that the best things in life are knowledge, achievement, pleasure,
Equus is a play written by Peter Shaffer in 1973. It tells the story of a psychiatrist called Dysart who is trying to help Alan Strang, a young teenager who has established that horses are his main religion. Equus explores different themes who are relatable to all of us as human beings. One of those themes is suffering, condensed in the following quotation; “Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain”. We need to understand our individual pain in order to know what makes our life different from that of others. No one manages pain or responds to it in the same way so it is different for each person although all of us experience physiological and physical pain. Physiological pain is usually the most
The Lais of Marie de France is a compilation of short stories that delineate situations where love is just. Love is presented as a complex emotion and is portrayed as positive, while at other times, it is portrayed as negative. The author varies on whether or not love is favorable as is expressed by the outcomes of the characters in the story, such as lovers dying or being banished from the city. To demonstrate, the author weaves stories that exhibit binaries of love. Two distinct types of love are described: selfish and selfless. Love is selfish when a person leaves their current partner for another due to covetous reasons. Contrarily, selfless love occurs when a lover leaves to be in a superior relationship. The stark contrast between the types of love can be analyzed to derive a universal truth about love.
Morality is an idea that has been long forgotten in our society. As generations come and go, so do the general ideas of what is right and wrong. Actions that would have once been seen as morally wrong are now clouded over by the biggest player in today’s society, the market. The market system has defaced morality in almost every aspect. Whether it has to do with someone buying their way up a transplant list for a kidney or betting on what celebrity will die first on a popular website, morality has been put on the back burner. Of all the facets of life where market has taken over morality, insurance is a prominent one. In Michael Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets”, Sandel speaks of the reality behind a specific type of insurance, janitor’s insurance, and the price it puts on a human’s life. Sandel questions the distastefulness of janitor’s insurance by focusing on the role that the
There is a huge difference between life in the United States as it is today and in the 1950s/1960s. The greatest change is the way in which people lived back then verses how they live today and there are many things that influence these changes. For example, after World War II ended, there was a large increase in childbirth throughout the United States. As a result of this, many Americans moved to the suburbs in hopes of a better life. This would create not only more job opportunities, but some leisure as well. There also has been a significant change in the roles that both men and women played in society in the 1950s/1960s verses today. For instance, women are no longer looked upon as just a “House Wife”. Back in the 1950s/1960s, after a woman started a family her main job was to take care of the household while the men
Does anyone have an idea what 28,800 is? This is the number which converted to seconds from eight hours that is the average working time for full-time workers. It takes 6,912,000 seconds in a year if they work five days in a week. The working hours occupy about one third of a day. Depending on how people spend each moment in their time, feeling of happiness of life would be totally different. During the late 20 century, people did not have many choices about their occupations. They might have unprofitable jobs; nevertheless, they were working joyfully. In 1974, Marge Piercy, political and social activist, wrote the poem, “To be of use” to display ideal personalities of employees (1175). On the other hand, in this modern society, while developing economy provides numerous kinds of jobs, many people seem to have troublesome in work. I demonstrate the displeasure with cranky employees in my poem, “To be useless” to symbolize the people who contain these qualities while having a job in current society. Although both poems have the same theme of a fulfilling life, the ways of expression of the theme are two extremities in their different
"The Futile Pursuit of Happiness" by Jon Gertner was published in September of 2003. It is an essay that discusses the difference between how happy we believe we will be with a particular outcome or decision, and how happy we actually are with the outcome. The essay is based on experiments done by two professors: Daniel Gilbert and George Loewenstein. The experiments show that humans are never as happy as we think we will be with an outcome because affective forecasting and miswanting cause false excitement and disappointment in our search for true happiness.