Remembering and Reflecting on the Holocaust Answers

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.

We arrived at the station, where the cattle cars were waiting. Ever since my book Night I have pursued those nocturnal trains that crossed the devastated continent. Their shadow haunts my writing. They symbolize solitude, distress, and the relentless march of Jewish multitudes toward agony and death. I freeze every time I hear a train whistle.

Which best describes Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea?

Read the excerpt from Elie Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea.My very last resistance broken, I let myself be pulled, pushed, and kicked, like a deaf and mute sleepwalker. Read the text and study the image from Art Spiegelman’s Maus.The theme best expressed by both Wiesel and Spiegelman is

Read the excerpt from Wiesel’s All Rivers Run to the Sea.My very last resistance broken, I let myself be pulled, pushed, and kicked, like a deaf and mute sleepwalker. I could see everything, grasp it and register it, but only later would I try to put in order all the sensations and all the memories. How stunned I was, for example, to discover another time outside time, a universe parallel to this one, a creation within Creation, with its own laws, customs structures, and language.Read the text and study the image from Spiegelman’s Maus.Which theme is addressed in both excerpts?

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.

Which statement explains why Elie Wiesel most likely wrote All Rivers Run to the Sea as a memoir?

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

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

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.