Yet Another Immersion Novel Blog Post...

Due to the fact that you did not assign a certain number of sentences to be used for this blog, I am going to assume you would like at least 10. There's one down the drain. Oh, there's two! But in all seriousness, it's time to answer some questions. I learned a lot about the Holocaust from reading the novel. For instance, I didn't know that sometimes one of the prisoners would be assigned to assist the SS officers. They were called a Kapo. Also, I didn't know the names of some of the camps, such as Buna, and Auschwitz. Another thing I found really interesting was the fact that you were actually allowed to bring 20 lbs of your own stuff. I found the ending of the book to actually be really confusing, because it didn't really "end." It kind of just left off with him reflecting on himself in a mirror. It could be considered a powerful ending, I guess. But I don't think that I really see the artfulness of it. The ending I guess could be used to say that things like the Holocaust change the victims. Because Wiesel ends it by saying that the way he looked after he was rescued has haunted him for the rest of his life. That is probably what he was trying to do, but I felt the ending was still pretty weak and I didn't get much out of it overall.

Holocaust Memorial/Museum (Depending on where you went)

I'm not quite sure why, but I don't remember much from the Holocaust museum. It wasn't really that memorable an experience for me. However, when I try and extract one thing that I think of from the museum, it was the part where one was able to walk through a model of one of the cars that as much as 100 people were packed into. It was small! And I guess that's why I remember it so much. It was also really dark inside of the cart, making it feel really... off-putting I guess. That part of the museum I think was just made to feel kind of realistic, because the train cart was actually on top of a set of rails. This is what would really allow someone to put themselves in the Holocaust victims' shoes. I guess that from visiting the museum I got a different take on the Holocaust, because the museum made it seem more like second-person narrative, through which one could place themselves in the shoes of a Holocaust victim and experience things like standing inside of the rail cars.

Bearing Witness

Elie Wiesel seems to be a very important figure on the topic of the holocaust. All I really know him for is his book Night, because that's the only thing I've read by him. I actually remember reading this quote and knowing exactly what it meant. To me, the meaning is kind of obvious, and that's why I've spent about 4 sentences stalling. It means, basically, that we need to remember both the dead and the living, and keep even the dead alive in memorial. One could do this by, say, creating a memorial (A.K.A. what everyone has already done). However, there are other ways to remember, such as through their personal possessions (which I guess they wouldn't have many surviving ones, being a Holocaust victim/survivor). For helping consider the events of the Holocaust, this quote is useful because it is a good quote to help in remembrance of said Holocaust related events.

The Other Immersion Novel Blog Post

So (have you noticed I start most of my blogs with "so?"), Night got really interesting recently, and by that I mean I finished it. But now I have to talk about what happened during the book so… I guess it's time to revisit some old events, like that one guy who kills his father to get some bread. Or how the Rabbi's son abandon's his father so that he can live longer. Or maybe that scene where the Nazis kill Juliek for playing the violin. But that's all just inhumanity, let's talk about some of the fun stuff: trying to find something good in the terrible world of the Holocaust (which is still technically our world, in a literal sense). I guess that the part where Elie's family hides their valuables could be considered an act of humanity (you can see how much I'm floundering with that one) but overall, I don't think this book mainly focuses on the humane aspects of the Holocaust. It's just pretty much showcasing people doing inhumane things because they are either hungry, trying to save their own skins, or just not thinking strait. 

Immersion Novel

The author introduces the character in multiple different ways that work very well. For instance, some information on the main character is given through how the Nazis treat him. The character is made to seem more weak by having the Nazi's descriptions of him included in the dialogue. The author does not use much physical description of the narrator because it is in the first person. The physical description also isn't really a key part in this kind of story. There are many descriptions of the other characters however. The description is mostly used to show the decrepit conditions that the other people are in. This kind of physical description isn't used until the very last paragraph of the book. The only character that can be noticed to be prominent in the early parts of the book other than the narrator is the narrators father, and this is mostly because he is the only character that isn't killed off within a few seconds of meeting them.

If Euphemisms Could Kill...

Oh wait, they can. The name Kristallnacht is basically a euphemism for the ransacking and slaughtering of Jewish homes, and Jews themselves (and by that I don't mean that they ransacked Jews, or slaughtered Jewish homes. I could have made the grammar a bit better there). There are some other ways of putting this subject into other terms, such as putting a frog in a pot of boiling water (it's not as fun as it sounds). For instance, when using this metaphor, the boiling water would be Kristallnacht. This is because (quite obviously) the frog would be the Jewish people. The boiling water is what would have killed the frog, so Kristallnacht is what would have been harmful to the Jews. To answer the second question, they didn't fight because they didn't realize what would happen to them if they didn't fight. The euphemistic name shows it to be the boiling point because the fact that the event was given a euphemism by the Nazis shows how little they care about the Jews.

The Holocaust Is About Bunnies?

So, the Holocaust is about tiny bunnies being taken away by gigantic, mystery-shrouded creatures with nets? Well, kind of. Because, everything that we have gone over in class recently is intertwined and connected together (a bit redundant). The short humanity unit was all about the goods and bads of humanity. The Holocaust focuses a lot on the battle between the good and evil sections of humanity, the Nazis and their allies representing evil, while everyone else (I forget the name of the entire group against the Nazi party) represents good. The Terrible Things represent the Nazis, and the forest creatures represent everyone who gets killed by the Nazis. These three things that we worked on all represent of each other in one way or another.