¶ … Briar Rose" and "The Accident" are both stories told by Holocaust survivors that take the reader back to the days of concentration camps, reveal the horrors of their experiences, and show how they are forced to deal with them decades later in completely different worlds. Both stories take place in modern day, where people are the survivors cannot fathom such horrific acts. Both survivors deal with their pain by shutting down but both have different ways of finding peace.
Jane Yolen's "Briar Rose" tells the story of the main character, Becca, and her search to discover her dead grandmother's past. The story mixes present day with memories of the Holocaust, and is written like "Sleeping Beauty," the fairy tale. When her grandmother, Gemma, dies, Becca finds several clues to her past: a box with keepsakes, old pictures, a ticket stub, a man's passport, an engraved ring, and newspaper clippings. Becca also has memories of the story of "Briar Rose" or "Sleeping Beauty," which was told to her many times by Gemma.
Her clues lead her to Poland, where she meets Josef, a main character, who helps her dig up the past. By the end of the novel, Gemma's past is unlocked and it is shocking to discover what the woman endured in her lifetime. Gemma's tale of "Briar Rose" was used to help her cope with the horrible things she suffered. Josef finds some sort of peace because he was able to help others. And Becca is able to move on because she finally understands what Gemma's life was about....
This is why he fled his adoptive parents' home, and confidently volunteered to solve the riddle of the Sphinx. Because he believed he had the ability to outwit fate he confidently issued a proclamation to Thebes, telling the suffering citizens he would be sure to punish whomever was the cause of the plague -- and unwittingly condemning himself. But in "Oedipus at Colonus," Oedipus is a humbled man. He
"And we, the Jews of Sighet, were waiting for better days, which would not be long in coming now." (Night 5) Even as they were taken to death camps, many Jewish individuals continues to believe that God was with them and that they needed to act in agreement with his plan, despite the fact that it involved them having to suffer. While Wiesel started to doubt God's plan, he continued
In "A Story of an Hour" the protagonist must confront the idea that for her to live, her husband and her conventional, protected domestic existence must die. What has been really killing her is not her weak heart, but her entrapment in misery, and when she is returned to the prison of her misery, she expires -- not of joy, but of the shock that she cannot escape. The
.. We appointed a Jewish Council, a Jewish police, an office for social assistance, a labor committee, a hygiene department -- a whole government machinery. Everyone marveled at it. We should no longer have before our eyes those hostile faces, those hate-laden stares" (Wiesel, p9). Chances of surviving the camps depended largely on whether one was deported to a work camp or a death camp and whether one was of sufficient age
Because Elie Wiesel's Night provides one of the most graphic and intimate accounts of the horrors of the holocaust and the effect it has on the human psyche, it serves as the best primary source that can be used to teaching the Holocaust to a secondary level high school classroom. Not only is it an essential book to read, it serves to move the curriculum forward in teaching students how
The prize is not awarded every year, since 1901 there have been 19 years in which it was determined that no candidate fit the criteria. However, in 1986 Wiesel received the prize because of his continual work towards reminding humanity that violence, repression and racism have no place in the modern world. Since 1958, and the publication of Night, Wiesel continued to write, lecture, and advocate a continual "message
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