Maddie needed (needs!) to read this book for her Holocaust class, but I attended the class with her on Friday and was intrigued enough by the discussion of the book to read it myself. It is a quick read -- and there is no new information if you know quite a bit about the Holocaust (unlike the book Sarah's Key, where I learned new information altogether). But I am not entirely sure if I have read a text on a survivor's account of what happened to him. Have I? I really don't know. But Elie was torn from his life when he was 15 and placed into a concentration camp with his father. His mother and younger sister were in the wrong line and were gassed immediately. It did highlight many of the same questions that I have always had ... they had a clue, they really did. But they chose NOT to do anything but wait and see. They put their faith in God. When they actually went into the camps, it was well into the game, and some of the people who had been in the camp for a year or longer were HORRIFIED to see them come in. Their response was IT IS 1944 and YOU ARE HERE? They were SO ANGRY that despite their friends and family disappearing altogether and never being heard from again, that they still waited to get carted away themselves.
The other thing that struck me was how random it all was. It was all about surviving -- and while their humanity was stripped away altogether, the will to live was pretty darn strong. Children would look away while their fathers were beaten and then steal the crust of bread from them. It was pretty horrible and it's amazing to think that this man could continue to live amongst humankind knowing what he does and seeing what he has seen. It can't have been easy. As the Russians are getting closer and closer and beginning to liberate the prison camps, the Nazi's take the prisoners and send them on death marches. They make them run, without food or water, for days. When someone falls, they are shot. When they die, they are left behind. That is the point, after all. What is SO sad is that at the second to last camp, Eli has some kind of foot problem, and he is in the infirmary having it fixed. There was definitely some compassion amongst the brutality, and while it was dangerous to be in the infirmary (why would they try to keep a Jew alive, when really all they cared about was killing them?) Elie trusts the doctor. When the Russians are about to "invade," he has to make a choice. He is told that all patients in the infirmary will be left behind (and then ultimately saved). But he can't believe that ... how could he? His father would have been allowed to stay with him too. But he stands up on his injured foot, and runs for days and days and days. This does his father in -- and at the final camp, his father dies. Not too long after, Elie is liberated. (And then later he finds out that if they had stayed, then ...) but that was what it was all about -- just pure dumb luck, timing, getting out of the gas chamber line before the SS saw you -- crazy.
My only complaint is that the book ends when he is freed -- but I have so many more questions about him. How did he survive knowing what he did? I mean, he is still alive and lectures, etc. but still.
Tomasen: An amazing read and yet such a small book. Both of my kids have now read this in school...truly moving.
So I was playing around in the Kindle section at Amazon, and noticed there was free content ... so I checked it out. This book was actually free, so I figured, what the heck. At first I was a little put off by the cliche-type commentary, obviously not a polished writer. And yet, and yet! I couldn't put the dumb book down. It was a cute little love story and I thoroughly ate it up.
