The Wrong Boy By Suzy Zail

766 Words2 Pages

The Wrong Boy is a historical fiction novel written by Suzy Zail that explores the agonising experiences that Hanna Mendel, a Jewish teenager, endured during her time at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a detrimental genocide carried out by Adolf Hitler from 1941-1945. It resulted in the death of 6 million Jews. Zail symbolizes the concepts of identity and loss, hope and humanity, and the significance of learning from the terrors of the past and the importance of not repeating them through her portrayal of Hanna’s traumatic experiences. Zail describes how Jews suffered from identity loss through the degrading conditions of the camp and how maltreatment and racial discrimination stripped individuals of their identities during the Holocaust. Towards the beginning of …show more content…

Not because I’d be embarrassed. but because, stripped to his underwear. he was just another Jew.” This line conveys Hanna’s sense of pride and how she didn’t want to lose her pride and dignity and didn’t want to see that happen to her family either. She didn’t want to be called different, she wanted to be treated equally. This can be seen in the line “I didn’t like being different, and at that moment, I didn’t much like being a Jew.” In this line, Zail highlights how Hanna was beginning to dislike her difference and her religion. She was beginning to lose her faith in her identity. “Nothing belonged to me anymore, not my piano, my home, my name or my hair. I was a number now.” This line lists how Hanna started to feel her identity slipping away from her as she lost the things that were most important to her. The metaphor “I am a number now”

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