Billy and Ronald Weary are captured by German soldiers, while the other two soldiers were shot trying to flee the scene. Just before Billy’s capture, he experiences his first time travel through his life. Billy is now able to time travel through his life, but he is unable to control when he time travels or where he goes. Being able to time travel allows Billy to mature and learn major lessons about life. This creates probably the strongest theme and symbol: being optimistic and “Fourth-Dimension.” While time traveling, one frequent settings of the book is Billy’s life on Tralfamadoria.
When captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him hinged, wooden clogs to wear. Billy and the other prisoners are transported to Luxembourg. By 1945, the prisoners are transported to Dresden to perform "contract labor". The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse in Dresden. Their building is known as Slaughterhouse Five.
The year after, the camp was temporarily transformed into an Armed Forces Training Camp. All prisoners were transferred to Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Flossenbuerg. After the prisoners returned in February 1940, a new horror would come: prisoner selection. SS doctors would select prisoners deemed to be too ill to work. Continuing the punishment, a crematorium site was chosen.
To prevent enemy soldiers from returning to their troops, the Japanese held prisoners of war in horrible camps throughout Japan, forced them to work in horrendous conditions, and treated them inhumanely. The living conditions the prisoners had to endure on the way to the camps was truly awful. When transported, the men were crammed into rusty old freighters and spent several nights in these “hell ships” (“The POW Camps”). The men on the ships had no room to move, were ill with dysentery and had very little food. Sometimes they were transported from one “hell ship” to another on their journeys to work camps.
In La Grande Illusion, we are first presented with the capture of Marechal, a mechanic and Boeldieu, an aristocrat. These two men fighting during the war are transported to a prisoner of war camp where they are greeted by a large group of men already staying there. The men immediately form a kind of camaraderie in trying to escape, regardless of their class. They speak mostly of their lives before the war, reminiscing on meals that they had and women that they had been with. There is not one woman present here, and this lack of femininity rears its’ ugly head when the men are given a trunk of women’s clothing.
These are the complex question Kurt Vonnegut addresses in his novel Slaughterhouse 5. This intricate novel explores the human purpose on earth through a story told about a Prisoner of war. This novel’s discourse of purpose is reflected in many different ways and Vonnegut attempts to prove that our lives have no direction or meaning and we are just puppets being played by a greater force. The main character, Billy Pilgrim is a chaplain’s assistant that gets captured in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Billy is taken with the other P.O.W’s to an abandoned slaughterhouse in Dresden.
Novel Title and Author: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Author’s Background: Kurt Vonnegut Jr., born on November 11, 1922, to a German-American family residing in Indianapolis, established himself as an American author best known for Slaughterhouse-Five. At Shortridge High School, Vonnegut served as the columnist, editor, and reporter of the school newspaper. Attending Cornell University (New York), he became the managing editor of the Cornell Sun before dropping out to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1943. During World War II, Vonnegut was captured by Nazis and was held prisoner in Dresden. During an Allie raid destroying Dresden, he survived by “hiding in an underground meat locker labeled ‘slaughterhouse-five’ along with other Allied prisoners of war.” This experience provided the inspiration for his premier novel.
The correctional system helps both the victim and the criminal to move forward. Jails place in Corrections Have you ever watched one of those medieval movies where the King orders a wrongdoer to be locked in the dungeon? In the dungeon they are tortured and mistreated. They are forced to live in the most inhumane conditions known to man they look sick, hungry, and very dirty. This was the prison system in the 1700’s.
Anja is the mother of Art and the Wife of Vladek. Being a fragile character right from the beginning, when Anja was in the Holocaust, she became increasingly ill, both physically and emotionally. Hence, even if Anja survived through all the insanity in the concentration camps, the depressions and breakdowns might have made her commit suicide. In Maus I, Spiegelman showed the reader that Vladek and Anja already developed a strong bond and this was evident throughout their time together in World War II. The couple hid in a cellar house where there was no food, Vladek said “Here Anja, chew on this.
(Brown 2) Anne decorated her narrow room in the “Secret Annex” with pictures of movie stars. (Gale 4) At first Anne thought of hiding as an adventure, but soon later she found that among her family and friends they were always arguing. There was also a common fear among them, getting discovered. They went undetected for twenty-five months. (Brown 2) Then August 4, 1944 someone tipped off the police and the Frank’s, Van Daan’s, and Mr. Dussel were all sentenced to attend the Bergen-Belson concentration camp in Germany.