Remembering and Reflecting on the Holocaust Answers

Read the text and study the image from Art Spiegelman’s Maus.What message is Spiegelman trying to convey in the panel?

Which best describes Art Spiegelman’s work Maus?

In this universe some men existed only to kill and others only to die. And the system functioned with exemplary efficiency: tormenters tormented and crushed their prey, torturers tortured human beings whom they met for the first time, slaughterers slaughtered their victims without so much as a glance, flames rose to heaven and nothing ever jammed the mechanism. It was as if it all unfolded according to a plan decreed from the beginning of time.

Elie Wiesel most likely wrote All Rivers Run to the Sea to

Why were those trains allowed to roll unhindered into Poland? Why were the tracks leading to Birkenau never bombed? I have put these questions to American presidents and generals and to high-ranking Soviet officers. Since Moscow and Washington knew what the killers were doing in the death camps, why was nothing done at least to slow down their “production”? That not a single Allied military aircraft ever tried to destroy the rail lines converging on Auschwitz remains an outrageous enigma to me. Birkenau was “processing” ten thousand Jews a day. Stopping a single convoy for a single night—or even for just a few hours—would have prolonged so many lives.

Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea is a

Both Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea and Spiegelman’s Maus relate events of the Holocaust

Read the excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea.I didn’t understand, though I wanted to. Ask any survivor and you will hear the same thing: above all, we tried to understand. Why all these deaths? What was the point of this death factory? How to account for the demented mind that devised this black hole of history called Birkenau?Perhaps there was nothing to understand.Based on the excerpt, the author would most likely agree that

To this day I am shaken when I see a child, for behind him I glimpse other children. Starving, terrified, drained, they march without a backward glance toward truth and death—which are perhaps the same. Uncomplaining, unprotesting, asking no one’s pity, it is as if they have had enough of living on a planet so cruel, so vile and so filled with hate that their very innocence has brought their death.

Read the excerpt from Rena Kornreich Gelissen’s Rena's Promise: Two Sisters in Auschwitz.“I have a favor to ask of you, Andrzej . . . This is very difficult for me, but I must ask. It is no longer safe in Tylicz for Rena. Her mother and I are worried for her safety every day.” Read the text and study the image from Art Spiegelman’s Maus.The theme best expressed in both excerpts is