Preview

The Shawl: The Tragedy of the Holocaust

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1556 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Shawl: The Tragedy of the Holocaust
The Tragedy of the Holocaust

Most individuals in society think of literature as just a simple story that the author creates. What most individuals don’t know is that authors have a meaning for writing literature, not just simply for pleasure. Most authors write literature to show a message to the audience whether it’s a personal story or a historical event. The author does this by providing the audience with visual image and emotion that is created throughout the story. In the short story “The Shawl”, author Cynthia Ozick shows the audience the horrible events that took place during the Holocaust and how much individuals suffered during this time. While reading “The Shawl”, the reader can feel and imagine throughout the book all the suffering and pain that the Holocaust caused the Jewish people. This short story is great for individuals to know what really took place during this time in life and why it’s so important to make sure that our society never turns to this again. After an Individual reads the short story “The Shawl”, one will see the tragic events that happened during the holocaust.
Author Cynthia Ozick starts of her short story by introducing the three sisters that are the main characters in the story, which are Magdna, Rosa and Bella. Rosa was the oldest sister, Bella was fourteen years old and Madna was just a fifteen-month-old baby. Age difference during the Holocaust did not matter. If you were a baby, child, teenager or adult, German soldiers were determine to kill any Jewish individual during this time. Another thing during the Holocaust was how horrible the living conditions were in the concentration camps. While reading, the audience can imagine the living scene at the concentration camp. As Rosa describes the scene of the concentration camp, the audience can picture seeing dirt, bugs and diseases that surrounded them. Rosa also informs the audience of how beauty can be so close to evil. While Rosa is looking inside the concentration camp she

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Few historical events were as gut-wrenchingly horrifying as the Holocaust. It inspired countless stories in the decades that followed it. One example, Frank Borowski's “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is a saddening story about a man working at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during World War II. It details his experiences collecting the belongings of prisoners who arrived at the camp, and his interactions with another worker. A large portion of the text had the narrator describing various specific prisoners, and thinking about how they affect him. This section presented an ironic incompatibility between two outlooks that is worthy of analysis, and provided indication as to Borowski’s intent for writing the story.…

    • 661 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    People of America today are mostly sheltered from the poor reality of the world and are protected behind the safety of Laws and the standard social normality. Some people are so ‘protected’ from the real world that they have the impression that the Holocaust never existed. The denial of the Holocaust is assumably one of many reasons writers/prisoners of the Holocaust vocalized their stories. Eli Wiesel the narrator and author of ‘From Night’ expresses his experience as a prisoner of war, held by German Nazis, in his short autobiography. Wiesel employs imagery as a Literary device to reveal how they perceived the dehumanizing and harsh affects of the Holocaust and how they adapted for their survival.…

    • 525 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Night by Elie Wiesel is an autobiography about his experience during the holocaust when he was fifteen years old. Elie is fifteen when the tragedy begins. He is taken with his family through many trials and then is separated from everyone besides his father. They are left with only each other of which they are able to confide in and look to for support. The story is told through a series of creative writing practices. Mr. Wiesel uses strong diction, and syntax as well as a combination of stylistic devices. This autobiography allows the readers to understand a personal, first-hand account of the terrible events of the holocaust. The ways diction is used in Night helps with this understanding.…

    • 982 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    If there was a god, why would he/she be so harsh? The text is compared to the book Night by Ellie Wiesel and from the poems “Night over Birkenau” and “Harbach 1944”. The book Night tells the story of a young boy and his father fighting for their freedom from the Nazis; Ellie Wiesel tells the story of his experience of the Holocaust. Both of the poems show the journeys of people and how they pictured all of the madness. Ellie fights through many hardships, but comes out of the Holocaust victorious! Ellie and his father were both willing and strong throughout the Holocaust, but his father escaped a different way. The theme states that during survival, people think about needs rather than wants. This is clearly developed in the poems “Night over Birkenau” By Janos Piliszky and “Harbach 1944” and Night to show harshness, survival, and fear.…

    • 556 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Diary of Anne Frank is a remarkably moving book about the short life of a young girl and her family. The Holocaust was a horrible time for Jewish people and Anne and her Jewish family’s lives were completely turned upside down as a result. The war resulted in the deaths of countless people, mostly innocent people. Before the invasion on D-day and the end of the war not too long after, the rest of the world didn’t know the real disaster going on over seas. Anne Frank’s once secret diary has introduced the immense suffering and horror that occurred during the Holocaust.…

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Life was not easy when the Nazi’s were in control. The Nazi’s did a lot of bad things while they were in power. For example, On November 10th, 1938 “Kristallnacht”or the “Night of Broken Glass”, the Germans were forced to kill every Jew or to order them to do labor. Also, they had to burn every shop owned by a Jew.…

    • 167 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    During the late 1930’s the world was contaminated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Holocaust is defined as follows: “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.” During the Holocaust, the Nazis, under the command of Adolf Hitler, liquidated over six million Jews. There is one Jewish survivor whose story especially touched my heart and changed my attitude towards life for the better. This amazing woman is Krystyna Chiger. Krystyna and her family escaped the Nazi liquidation by living in sewers for fourteen months (qtd. in “The Girl in the Green Sweater” 5). Accordingly, thorough assessments of my personal experiences according to the life lessons of Krystyna Chiger descriptively visualize the Holocaust and its everlasting impact on society.…

    • 1240 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Night Figurative Language

    • 1522 Words
    • 7 Pages

    When you read, do you ever felt like there is a recording playing in your head, telling the story to you? Have you ever noticed that each writer has a “voice” that is completely their own? Why do all of the great authors have a “sound” exclusive to themselves? Using precise wording and distinctive phrases, writers can manipulate your thoughts and emotions to help the reader understand the content of the literature. This is especially helpful when the subject matter is uncomfortable and harsh, such as the lives of inmates in the Nazi concentration and death camps during World War II. Relating to this book, Wiesel was imprisoned in Buchenwald and Auschwitz for being a Jew, and in particular uses his style to tell the tale of those two camps’…

    • 1522 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Introduction “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” (Night).…

    • 914 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Holocaust is considered the greatest act of hate and anti-Semitism in modern history. This relentless act of hate and genocide was made possible by the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler’s orders carried out by Heinrich Himmler to exterminate Jews and other minorities. The Holocaust is responsible for over 9 million people (an estimate of 6 million people murdered were Jews). Because the Holocaust was so insidious, this part of history cannot be forgotten to prevent these atrocities from ever happening. The book Night by Elie Weisel shows some infamous reasons why the Holocaust should never be forgotten.…

    • 584 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Concentration camps showed us inhumanity on a scale previously unimagined. However the setting in place of such inhumane behaviour began some years before with the systematic dehumanising of the Jews by breaking down social structures and relationships and taking away their place in civil society. The novel shows that there is great inhumanity displayed from this personal journey of Elie Wiesel. The Jews were tortured every day for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own amusement. The SS officers treated the men as if they were animals, making them fight for food. Women, babies, old, sick, and handicapped were put into the crematoriums as soon as they arrived at the camps. The Germans stripped the Jews to nothing and took away everything close to them, separation from loved ones, isolation, transportation and the ruthless, cold actions towards them in the camps such as starvation and selections of the fittest. They killed people for no reason, with no remorse whatsoever. Tortures, being treated like animals, and being burned alive or killed were all things that led to the Jews feeling as if they were not human.…

    • 674 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    For this final project we have been asked to select a significant sociological event for which I have chosen the Holocaust of World War II, and then analyze the effects on society by answering the several questions. First how and why this event was sociologically interesting? Next we will discuss what social context that the event occurred in. Then we will look at how many people were affected by this event and the presence of possible trends in shared characteristics of the people affected by this event or similar events. Finally we will discuss the sociological theory that best explains this event.…

    • 1736 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Justice In The Holocaust

    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages

    By the end of World War II, about two-thirds of the Jewish population were killed. Countless people lost their family and their friends. When the survivors were released from the concentration camps, numerous individuals had nowhere to go, and no place to call home. The Allied forces tried a multitude of Nazi War criminals in the Nuremberg Trials hoping that the imprisonment or killing of these flawed, yet guilty German officials would bring justice to those who survived the Holocaust. But was justice truly ever achieved?…

    • 480 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Holocaust first started in Germany in 1933, when Jew and other ethnicities began to lose their right. It began with exclusion from school, certain jobs and other public roles. Then Jews had to wear the Star of David so be identified, and soon after a mandatory curfew was imposed. Not long after, Jews were forced into ghettos and then into concentration camps (“The Holocaust” par. 12-18). Heinz Skyte, a German survivor of the Holocaust, recalls what happened when the Nazis first came to power:…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In several instances, as Vladek recounts, the Nazis would leave notes or make announcements about certain groups of people that would soon be transported to another area, or that needed to be “registered.” These notes given to the Jewish families made the area a specific group would “relocate to” seem magnificent--an obvious lie for readers--but these so-called relocations all led to the same place: Auschwitz. For example, when the Spiegelman’s receive a notice from the Germans, they believe that those over seventy-years-old will be relocated into a nice home, “‘All Jews over 70 years old will be transferred to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on May 10, 1942…” “It doesn’t look too bad!” “Like a convalescent home”’ (86). After sending Vladek’s wife’s grandparents away, the Spiegelman’s heard that “they went right away to Auschwitz, to the gas” (87). This approach of suppressing the Jewish populations demonstrates a type of divide and conquer. The Nazis were able to take certain Jews and supervise them, before being taken to their deaths. Ultimately, this division of families caused great agony and anguish among each family member. Anja, Vladek's wife, bespeaks this suffering and distress upon understanding that her nephew will be transported to Auschwitz next as she cries, “‘My whole family is gone! Grandma and Grandpa! Poppa! Momma! Tosha! Bibi! My Richiev!!…

    • 787 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays