“The sliding-door of the railway truck closed with a deafening clang.” The Final Journey by Gudrun Pausewang is a historical fiction novel that takes place on a train taking jews to Auschwitz. Alice is a little girl that is 11 years old. She is a jew and is living with her grandparents. They were then told to board a train heading East. Alice and her grandparents were actually going to a prison camp but Alice didn’t know that and she thought that they were going to a safer place to run from the war. When they are boarding the train Alice and her grandfather were separated from grandmother. The trip was taken on a train that was used for carrying cattle. During the train ride the conditions were horrible. One of the m being that there was no
where to sit besides the ground and the only place to go to the bathroom was in one of the corners on the train. While Alice was on the train ride Alice discovered that they were going to a prison camp. Alice was stunned and she then went on to confront her grandfather about it. When she did her grandfather died of shock because of his old age and her being so upset. She was adopted from a family on the train. While they were on the truck they would stop at several stations and they would never get supplies so they were very limited on what they had. Furthermore, there was one time where they made a stop and two people were allowed to get water from a nearby river. They ran out quickly because there was 50 people in that cart and there was only 2 buckets. After days and days of traveling Alice and all the other people on the train were unboarded off the train. Alice was then led to take a shower and her fate was to work in prison camps with all of the other people that had to suffer through the Holocaust. This story shows that always be grateful for what you have because a lot of people have less than you.
Summary: "The Cage" by Ruth Minsky Sender is a book about a teenage girl who was separated from her mother and brothers when the nazis captured them and sent them to a concentration camp. While she was in the concentration camp, she got sick and one of the Nazi guards took her to a hospital, but they had to go througgh several hospitals because they didn't take jews. After her operation, the doctor had to teach her how to write with her left hand because she couldn't write with her right hand. A russian commander helped her out by giving her food and baths, and she gave her a job that wasn't as hard as the other "prisoners" had. She lived off her mother's quote, "When there is life, there is hope." She believed that and she got through the
The main character in this story is a Jewish girl named Alicia. When the book starts she is ten years old, she lives in the Polish town of Buczacz with her four brothers, Moshe, Zachary, Bunio, and Herzl, and her mother and father. The Holocaust experience began subtly at first when the Russians began to occupy Buczacz. When her brother Moshe was killed at a “ Boys School” in Russia and her father was gathered up by German authorities, the reality of the whole situation quickly became very real. Her father was taken away shortly after the Russians had moved out and the Germans began to occupy Buczacz.
It gives facts and real life story living on this camp. This is actually someone real life story. When Jeanne dad left the family, the family could not bear. Living on the camps it was dusty, cold and windy. Jeanne states at the end that, “Even though her dad was a drunk, the way he drives—like a madman—actually inspires Jeanne with confidence to get past her fears of what life might be like outside of camp”. Growing up with all the racism remarks and surroundings was not easy and it has not been easy learning to remember and talk about her experience at the camp, but she overcame her fear. Jeanne has finally let it be free and be known. She now feels more better than ever about this. Also, even though Americans did not like Japanese she still married a
(Althea Williams and Sarah Ehrlich). A man by the name of Simon Gronowski escaped what to him was the “death train” when he was a boy and at 70 years of age recalls in an article by BBC news the atrocities people undergoing deportation during the Holocaust had to surpass. The Holocaust was a deportation, genocide, and mass murder of millions of people who weren’t only Jewish but. Minorities and those persecuted due to their sexual orientation; Perpetrated by Nazi Germany, millions passed away due to the atrocities committed. A poem titled “Auschwitz” by Charles Whittaker utilizes personification and enjambment as poetic devices to convey an underlying message of how
The main character of the novel is a thirteen-year-old boy named Eliezer. He and his family were taken from their home and placed in a concentration camp. He was separated from his mother and sisters during the selection once they arrived in the camp. His father was the only family he had left with him to face the inhumane environment of the camp. Many of the prisoners lost the will to live due to the conditions.
The sullen narrative This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen poignantly recounts the events of a typical day in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The author, Tadeusz Borowski, was Polish Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz, the series of death camps responsible for the deaths of the largest number of European Jews. Recounted from a first-person point of view, the novel unfolds at dawn as the unnamed narrator eats breakfast with a friend and fellow prisoner, Henri. Henri is a member of Canada, the labor group responsible for unloading the Jewish transports as they arrive into the camps. They are interrupted by a call for Canada to report to the loading ramps. Upon the arrival of the transport, the narrator joins Henri in directing the prisoners to either life, in the labor camps, or to death, in the gas chambers. In reality the path is neither one of life or death, rather it is routing prisoners to inevitable death or immediate death. Regardless of how many times he is asked, the narrator refuses to disclose to the transport prisoners what is happening to them or where they are being taken. This is camp law, but the narrator also believes it to be charitable to “deceive (them) until the very end”(pg. 115). Throughout the day the narrator encounters a myriad of people, but one is described in great detail: a young woman, depicted as being unscathed by the abomination that is the transport. She is tidy and composed, unlike those around her. Calmly, she inquires as to where she is being taken, like many before her, but to no avail. When the narrator refuses to answer, she stoically boards a truck bound for the gas chambers. By the end of both the day and of the novel, the camp has processed approximately fifteen thousand p...
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.
The book A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman is a very successful narrative about Vladek’s experience during the Holocaust. It tells the story of a Jewish holocaust survivor and his son who is a cartoonist transforming his father’s tale into a comic book. The son, Art, finds this event horrifying but also interesting so he feels others should read about it from the mouth of an actual survivor. The story jumps back and forth from present day to the days of the war. Art visits his father continuously to record parts of his story but he does not have a well-developed relationship with his father so these visits get tense. The father, Vladek, starts the story by saying how he met Art’s mother, Anja, who also survived the Holocaust, but she later committed suicide in May, 1968. Most of the story is the contact between Art and Vladek; Anja’s death is a major part of their relationship. It may be why they do not have an upright relationship. They have different ideas of Anja. For Vladek, Anja is the perfect wife; she was neat, wealthy, bright, and fluent in many languages like Vladek, whose own language fluency saves him in many situations. For Art, Anja is a needy and emotional mother but also the most compassionate towards him. We never get her side of the story, especially because after she commits suicide, Vladek destroys her diaries being unable to tolerate any image of Anja. In addition to the mother’s tragedy, Art has a brother, Richieu, who was born before the war in which he never meets. His mother’s sister, Tosha, took Richieu to stay with a relative to keep him far from the camps. The Germans eventually arrive in town and take the Jews to the camps so Tosha commits suicide and poisons Richieu, along with her own children. For ...
A large number of Jews are forced into a train car. The ride is very cramped and uncomfortable. A woman called Madame Shächter starts shouting about a fire that she can see every night. Her little boy clings to her and cries. Eventually the Jews tie her, gag her, and even hit her. They finally make it to Auschwitz at what seemed to be midnight, and see the flames Madame Shächter was yelling about. A tall crematory spewing flames and smoke loomed over them.
4) . The children were expected to stay clean, and keep their clothes clean for the entire length of the train ride which could last for weeks at a time if they were not selected at one of the earlier stops. They were mistreated, and spoken to harshly while in the company of the chaperones on the orphan trains, and it was clear that they had no compassion for the children. While on the train the children were fed, but not very often. The children would go nearly twenty-four hours without eating, and when they ate they were given, “some crusts of bread and milk and an apple each” (Kline New York City 1929-2, p. 3). The children were not permitted to wander off away from the group whenever the train stopped, and if they did they would be punished. When the train reaches the destinations arranged by the Children’s Aid Society, the children are instructed to look their best, and behave well while being paraded in front of families. The older children knew that there was a chance that they would be selected because they would be capable of being put to work. When Dutchy says to Niamh, “You should make out all right, at least you won’t be breaking your back doing farm work” (Kline,The Milwaukee Train 1929, p. 3), it shows that he is aware of what may be in store for him. If selected you would go with your new family, and if not you would board the train and continue on until you found a new home. The children did not know what would become of them once they were selected. Some children were received well by their new families while others were mistreated, neglected, or beaten, and they often “lost any sense of their cultural identities and backgrounds; siblings were often separated, and
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.
Railways have been important for transportation in Germany, as well as the rest of the world, ever since the invention of the locomotive. By 1939, Germany had the railroads of Austria, Sudentenland, Bohemia, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Danzig, and Poland in its possession (Oxlade). All of these different passageways by rail helped when Germany addressed the “Final Solution” in 1942. The Germans informed the Jews that they were being relocated eastward with resettlement in mind. The Jews were put in cattle, passenger, and freight cars (Museum).
Schwartz, Leslie. Surviving the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: a teenage struggle toward freedom from hatred.. S.l.: Lit Verlag, 2013. Print.
...satisfied and comforted. People in the tail section were utterly exhausted and lost their hope after experiencing a host great turmoil. The most serious and crucial problem I found in the movie is that a manager from the head section regularly visits the rear section and take some children with her. In the latter half of the movie clearly demonstrates how the children are being ‘abused’ with several purposes. Immature children with short stature go into the engine, the heart of the train, and modulate the saw teeth not to be mingled with each other. At the place where they have to lower their heads and close their legs, the innocent children were being sacrificed for the unknown people. Children with pure spirits became the victims of the pleasure and fortune of the greatest number of people. Who on earth would pledge the rights of the children and their parents?
Back to Poland, 1939: a small boy roamed around the Umschlagplatz, an assembly area for the Jews before they were loaded onto cattle cars toward certain death. He was all alone, his mother murdered, his father taken away. The s...