Summary of Chapters 7-9 As Chapter Nine starts, Eliezer and his father have managed to make it through selection and are placed on a carriage. During the trip, the SS officers order the prisoners to throw the dead bodies off the carriages and Eliezer struggles to protect his father from giving in to death. Each time the carriages stop, there are European men and women who throw bread into the wagons so that they can watch the prisoners fight each other to the death so they may get a bread crumb. Elie watches how hunger affects the prisoners as a young son murders his own father over a small piece of bread. As he is sleeping one night Elie feels hands wrap around his throat, trying to strangle him.
The author uses events that really happened in the Civil War to bring home the brutality of war--the building of a wall with dead bodies, young men shot in the stomach being left to die, horses being killed to feed starving men. These events must change the men involved. When Charley leaves for Fort Snelling, he is a smiling, fast-talking boy. Once Charley returns home, he is a different man-a broken man, in constant pain, unable to hold a job, and looking forward to his own death. Narrative
Everyone had seemed worried and scared. After days of exhaustion and starvation they had arrived at Auschwitz, where the men and women had been separated. The next camp that they arrived at was Buna where they were forced to work. The only thing that the prisoners had to eat was soup and bread, therefore many died. Prisoners were also forced to watch others get hanged.
When he returns, he tells the villagers about how he has miraculously escaped from his torturers. He also tells them shocking stories about the atrocities committed against the Jews by Hitler’s regime. When Elie and the other villagers do not believe his stories, thinking he has gone mad, Moshe weeps and tells his story again. As time passes, the Nazis treat the Jews worse and worse. First they shift the Jewish people to live in ghettos; then they arrest them and transport them to Birkenau, the reception center that leads to Auschwitz.
This is one of the many influences that Alois had had on Adolf as becoming a Nazi dictator and killing an entire race. Alois had grown up without a dad and knew what it felt like, so he wanted to make sure he pushed Adolf. Alois loved his children dearly, but he didn’t want them to turn out like him, making sure of this, he beat them and pushed them, whether it was to exhaustion or to extinction. Adolf then took his anger of this out on the whole Jewish race, as the Fuehrer during the years of the holocaust. In the twelve years he took out a whole race, ninety percent of the Jewish religion in Poland, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia.
Also, how he changes throughout the book is very noticeable. Elie, had to make a few major life-threatening decisions at the concentration camp. He had one major one with his dad. He would do almost anything for his dad in the beginning. But, his dad was getting beat up and him or his dad could not move.
Children witnessed disfigured corpses in the streets and heard terrible tales of people consuming, buying, and selling human flesh on the street. He was raised by his mother, while his father served in the army during WWII. While in the army, his father was captured as a prisoner of war (POW). It was said that his dad was a coward and deliberately got caught and killed. This may have been a ploy to escape Stalin’s harsh rule or to escape the responsibilities of fatherhood.
The students are marching like lemmings to their demise and ultimately falling into a meat grinder. In the next scene they reclaim their individuality and begin to revolt against the oppressive bonds by knocking down the wall. As the school burns down the teacher is overpowered by the students. The boy then wakes up from the dream . Pink Floyd’s lyrics “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall” is a metaphor for conforming.
Case Study: Robert Hansen History and the Crime Robert Hansen was born February 15, 1939 in Estherville, Iowa. He grew up as an antisocial child due to bad acne and a stuttering problem which led him to have few friends . His father was very strict and forced him to work many hours at the bakery which he owned. He was a small, straggly child and although he was left-handed, his father forced him to be right handed, contributing even more to his stuttering problem because of the increased frustration. After graduating high school he enlisted in the Army Reserves and after basic training he worked mostly in his father’s bakery.
At this point this becomes crucial, because the Nazi oppression in the concentration camps makes it harder for any relationship. It is shocking to Elie on many occasions, the cruelty sons show their fathers in many of the barracks. He says of this particular boy, “I saw one of thirteen beating his father because the latter had not made his bed properly. The old man was crying softly while the boy shouted, “If you don’t stop crying I shan’t bring you any more bread. Do you understand?” This event serves a warning to Elie not to lose his sense of compassion towards his father so that they can remain close and continue supporting each other because without each other neither of them will survive.