How were the German girls that lived within smelling distance of Auschwitz able to pass love notes to the soldiers that marched their skeletal prisoners past? How did the SS working in the camps reach the point that they were physically and mentally able to toss live infants into flames? How did this happen? How did so many average human beings contribute to this? I’m sure that ‘Why?’ might seem the more obvious choice here but I couldn’t let myself wander down the rabbit warren that is that question. There’s this question I kept asking myself while reading. At one point I even demanded that he explain this… thing to me.įifteen years later, my second read of this book has impacted me just as much as the first. After all, he hadn’t prepared me for what I found in this book. Mostly I was angry at the world and at humanity as a whole but I unfairly turned some of that on my father. I remember getting really angry when I finished this. For what were my “problems” compared to those of this narrator? How “hard” was my life compared to what he endured? What millions of people similarly endured? I now understood my own insignificance in the grand scheme of things and suddenly the reality of the world was a crushing weight. I felt like a child, like a complete and utter fool. My parents wanted to spare me from what exactly that meant until they thought I was mature enough to be able to absorb it.Īnd for the first time in my life I was completely self-aware. I had only been told in the vaguest terms what had happened, that so many millions of people had been killed, that Hitler and his men had sought to exterminate the Jewish people. I watched documentaries about it with my father, the history nerd, listened to the few stories that my grandfathers would tell, but up until that point I had been intentionally sheltered from the horrors of the holocaust. Both of my grandfathers served in it and so my parents wanted to make sure that we understood the sacrifices they made, the things they saw. I got mad at my mom when she made me go to bed on time, I complained if I didn’t like what we were having for dinner and I argued about what I was and wasn’t allowed to watch on TV. My biggest concern was whether or not a boy named Jason liked me back. Before this book my world was sunshine and rainbows. I first read this in my eighth grade History class. But can we, the reader, even understand what happened there? Can modern men and women comprehend that cursed universe? The author, who is actually in the above picture, said it best in the forward “Only those who experienced Auschwitz know what it was.” I think we can all agree with that.
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