After reading The Assault by Harry Mulishch, about Anton Steenwijk’s experience in 1945 during World War II and coping with the memories of the traedy for the rest of his life, I am left somewhat shocked. Due to the assignation of Fake Ploeg, a Nazi Collaborator, and the body being planted in front of Anton’s house, the Nazis took revenge by killing Anton’s mother, father, and brother and torching their home. The emotional chaos happening at the young age of twelve during this incident follows Anton the rest of his life. Throughout reading the book you notice that in all the episodes a new piece for puzzle is revealed for further reason into the actions of the night in 1945, and more and more we see Anton slowly grow a little unstable as he tries to rationalize every last detail. To me this makes him seem irrational, the way he takes to the information, never getting to upset or letting it effect his life as it is now.…
The interactive oral presentation over The Assault by Harry Mulisch was mainly focused around the German occupation of the Netherlands and how it affected Mulisch´s writing and his personal life. The presenters explained that when the German Nazis invaded the Netherlands, they banned all other political parties. In the novel, we see that communism is banned, and people who are against the Nazis are often communists. While reading the novel, I did not understand how someone like Hitler could so easily control and invade so many nations. One presenter stated that before World War II, a majority of Europe was stuck in a depression. This made it easy for a leader like Hitler who promised to change the country for the better could easily get support…
Browning underlying premise in this study is that while the men of Battalion 101 may have been felt and expressed anti-semitic feelings, they may not have been enthusiastic ruthless killers. He argues that continued exposure to killings may have desensitized them to the horror they perpetrated on Jews. Additionally, he hinted that the totalitarian nature of the Third Reich could have contributed to self-preservation. In other words, these men killed partially because they may have feared that’s refusal to participate would be to their personal detriment. He supportsh is argument by documenting the everyday life of these men and through the narratives of their own experience. In the opening chapter, he describes them as uniformed men with “no previous experience in German occupied territory who were drafted into the Order Police”…
The Holocaust was a traumatizing and depressing time period in history due to the Nazis in the leadership of their dictator Adolf Hitler. The Nazis were a Political Party during World War ΙΙ from 1941 through 1945. Many Jews during this time were discriminated, murdered, and humiliated in front of many other Jews and Germans. “Six million Jews died in a merciless way at the hands of the Nazis” (Sherbok 1). The Holocaust is an unforgettable period in history that left a scar on many Jews including Vladek. Vladek was a Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust that experienced and witnessed several tragedies during this time. The war was over when his son Art Spiegelman is willing to write a book about the Holocaust. He asked his father Vladek if he could help him write his book by telling him his story and experiences during this time, Vladek agrees. Due to the Holocaust and unforgettable experiences Vladek went through, his life was never the same, he changed a lot in the manner of being more careful with money and resourceful with the things he had. Vladek also became very strict with his son Art Spiegelman and had a very strong character this is reasonable because as a young man he went through a crisis by going to the war at a young age, lost his wife and first son. The Holocaust definitely changed his style of living and his personality that led to a lot of consequences.…
Imagine living through the Holocaust as a European Jew. Some of the hardships of those who survived the Holocaust seem unbearable. The book Maus by Art Spiegelman depicts his father's story as he lives in Poland during WWII as a Jew. It covers his life while he was hiding from the German army and after when he was brought to Auschwitz. Vladek Spiegelman was lucky to have survived the Holocaust because, of the dangerous situations he encountered, the time he spent in concentration camps and the deadly illnesses he contracted.…
In his novel The Assault, Harry Mulisch illustrates a clear example at how human memory can aid us in pursuing a better future ahead of us. As Anton watched the motor boats on the first page of the novel he was amazed at how fast the motor boats moved and the wake they left behind. Each time he saw them zoom by he would try to follow their wake however its pattern became so distorted he could not follow it. Along side the motor boats were the gondolas where they were propelled by the captain pushing a stick back thus moving his boat forward. He then takes this approach on life and lives while constantly bringing up his past. Every time he attempted to look at what the…
In 1992, Christopher Browning published his book Ordinary Men, a work in which he narrates the experiences of the men in the Reserve Police Battalion 101. Browning begins by classifying the men as ordinary people, as his title suggests, but quickly reveals not only how easily these men succumbed to the vicious acts they were expected to carry out, but how swiftly they began to take extra measures that were unnecessary as a result of their loss of morality. Based on this, Browning’s account of this Battalion allows him to explain that the Holocaust was made possible…
Beahs experiences things no child should ever have to experience: “My squad was my family, my gun was my provider and protector, and my rule was to kill or be killed… My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen”(126). With losing his own family, Beahs tries adjusting to his new soldier friends and bonds with them. Also, his weapons can mean life or death. However, his rough childhood made Beah grow into a person who can accept change. In addition, Beah changes physically and emotionally, he is now a killer and cannot control his state of mind: “The corporal gave the signal with a pistol shot and I grabbed the man’s head and slit his throat in one fluid motion. His Adam’s apple made way for the sharp knife, and I turned the bayonet on its zigzag edge as I brought it out”(125). Here, the author illustrates that a person can change within a matter of time. This part of the memoir can have a huge impact on students because of how gruesome one human can be.…
Emanuel Jal not only tells his stor, but he makes his audience feel as if they are there in the villages with him. Jal gives a brief peek into his story at the beginning of the book. He used this to catch the readers attention and make them want to know every detail of what he went through. Jal says, “In the peaceful village we once knew, rockets blow apart houses with families inside, women are raped, and children are murdered.”(2). Jal’s description of what the war is causing around him pull the reader to read more. As this passage is read the mind begins to imagine everything listed. The mind feels the heat of the explosion, sees shame filled eyes of rape victims, and smells the dead bodies of hundreds. This passage shows a time lapse from…
This book describes the life of his father during his time in the camps, narrated by his father, but also includes scenes of Art himself commenting on the story as his father tells it to him. For example, when his father is retelling a dream he had about a voice telling him the he will be freed, “… on the day of parshas trauma,” Art interrupts him to ask what parshas trauma means (Spiegelman 57). Although many see this merely as an innovative literary tool, I believe that this shows that Art, a member of the second generation of survivors, wanted others to know about the Holocaust as well, which gives not just his father by also himself a lasting connection to the…
Maus is a novel, written by Art Spiegelman that depicts the life of his father, Vladek, a survivor of the Holocaust, and the struggles he went through to make it home to his wife, Anja. Vladek’s story is a detailed account of his journey from Poland to Auschwitz camp in Germany. However, not only does Spiegelman’s novel tell of Vladek’s life, but it also tells of his own, and his internal struggle with guilt, and regret for turning his father’s somewhat heroic account into a paycheck.…
When learning of the devastations of the Holocaust we are often only offered one side of the story, one view of the event, one account of the pain—that of the direct survivor. However, the effects of trauma live on forever, and stay with people even when they are not first-hand victims. In particular, there are children of Holocaust survivors or second-generation survivors whom face enormous difficulties as they come to terms with the horrendous plights faced by their ancestors. For Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, this was the struggle. Growing up with survivor parents exposed him to the presence and absence of the Holocaust in his daily life, causing confusion and great amounts of self-imposed guilt and blame. This havoc led to an underdeveloped identity early on—a lost and prohibited childhood, a murdered one. The effect of having survivor parents was evident in Art’s search for his identity throughout Maus, from the memories of his parent’s past and through the individual ways in which each parent “murdered” his search to discover meaning.…
Maus, written by Art Spiegelman, is a graphic novel that tells a story within a story. The book portrays Art’s father’s experiences as a Jew caught in the middle of World War II. What makes this portrayal especially interesting is the way the Art tells the story in his father’s own words. Vladek’s accounts of what happened to him are displayed within the bigger picture of the novel, which is how these experiences affect his current relationship with his son Art. Maus is significantly different from any other holocaust book I have ever read and I believe it stands out particularly because it is a graphic novel. Personally, I feel that this genre of writing is fascinating and that Maus would not be as effective a piece of literature if the author had not chosen to write it as a graphic novel. Some critics would argue that Art’s comic book style is juvenile and the lack of written text demeans the severity of the subject, however I completely disagree. His choice to visually tell his father’s story through illustrations, portray the characters as animals, and use of language throughout the text is what makes this story jump off the page. Because of these decisions, Maus does a great job of speaking the unspeakable.…
In Christopher Browning’s monograph, Ordinary Men (1992), he covered the answered the question of what transforms people into a cold-blooded killer. In synthesizing many different sorts of killings that place prior to and during the Holocaust, Browning studies the motives of the ordinary man, instead of the often-studied motives of Hitler and Himmler. By presenting the reader with a multitude of examples of killings varying in magnitude without presenting his theory of peer pressure as a cause, at the end, Browning allows the reader to arrive at their own conclusion.…
The Holocaust and war was no joking matter. Millions were executed both intentionally and unintentionally. Men, women, husbands, wives, parents, grandparents, and children; The SS didn’t care. Nor did the Poles, Germans, or anyone at all for that matter. Nobody cared about the “dirty Jews”, the “filthy dogs”, or the “swine dogs”. There were so many insults that it’s impossible to name them all. People were malnourished, lonely, and hopeless. This torture was part of the everyday life of a young man named Lucek Salzman (George Lucius Salton). This boy lost his parents at age 14 and his brother at age 15. He was beaten, he had paint poured over him, his latter was kicked by a German soldier (this ended up causing him to have an infected leg). What this man went through as a child was brutal, but the fascinating part is that he never gave up and he knew that he had a chance. Lucek Salzman had hope in the end.…