Introduction to WWII and the Holocaust
 Early 1930s: rise of Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler
 Axis powers: Germany, Italy, Japan
 WWII started in Europe with the German invasion of
Poland (1939) and in the Pacific with the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)
 Axis powers initially experienced success
 Allied powers: Great Britain, the United States, and
the Soviet Union
 In 1945 Allied powers defeated the Axis powers
 Hitler put his anti-Semitic views into practice when he
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came into power
“Final Solution” – war of genocide waged on the Jewish
population
Poland: Jews were executed and buried in mass graves
1942: Jews in all German-controlled nations were sent
to labor or death camps
End of the war: 5 million Jews killed in camps, over 10
million Jews, gypsies, Catholics, Africans, and other
“impure” people were killed by death squads
 a camp in which people are detained or confined,
usually under harsh conditions and without regard to
legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are
acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
 When researching historical events, it is important to
make sure the information is accurate. Having a
reliable resource is a great way to do this.
 Primary sources: firsthand, original accounts. Ex:
diaries, letters, memoirs, and newsreels. Reliable
eyewitness information.
 Secondary sources: written by people who were not
there. Ex: newspaper articles, biographies, history
books, ect. Secondary source credibility depends on
authorship and dates they were written.
 Born in Tennessee, raised in California
 Worked as an English professor in colleges across the
U.S.
 In 1942, Jarrell joined the U.S. Army Air Corps
 Served as a pilot before training pilots to fly B-29
bombers
 Wrote two books of poetry during the war
 Considering the information we’ve learned about
WWII, answer the following questions:
 What attitude toward war would you expect to find in a
poem written in 1945?
 What attitude toward war do you find in most literature
and films about war today?
Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
A ball turret was a plexiglass sphere set into the belly of a B-17
or B-24, and inhabited by two .50 caliber machine guns and
one man. When this gunner tracked with his machine guns a
fighter attacking his bomber from below, he revolved with
the turret; hunched upside down in his little sphere, he
looked like the fetus in the womb. The fighters which
attached him were armed with cannon firing explosive shells.
The hose was a steam hose.
~ Randall Jerrell
Using what you know about Randall Jerrell, is this passage a
primary or secondary source?
 Who is speaking in this poem?
 What is the temperature like in the ball turret?
 What happens to the speaker?
 “Belly” in line 2 of the poem can be read in two ways.
What is the literal meaning? What is the metaphoric
meaning?
 What details in Jarrell’s explanation of the ball turret
add levels of meaning to his poem?
 Review your Quickwrite. How well did you predict
Jarrell’s attitude toward war? Explain.
 1944: Wiesel was a 15 year old, living in Hungary with
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his family
March of that year Hungary was invaded by Germany
and the Nazis moved the Wiesel family to a
concentration camp in Germany-occupied Poland
He saw his mother and younger sister put into a gas
chamber to die
He saw his father succumb to dysentery
April 1945: Wiesel was liberated from the Buchenwald
concentration camp
 Wiesel promised himself that if he survived his time in
Buchenwald, he would devote his life to spreading the
world about the atrocities he witnessed
 He also fought for civil and human rights around the
world
 He wrote Night (originally titled And The World Kept
Silent) ten years after his release from Buchenwald
 Because of his writing, studies, and efforts to promote
human rights, he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1986
“This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering
what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I
speak to you and that I express to you my deepest
gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who
has emerged from the Kingdom of Night. We know that
every moment is a moment of grace, every hour is an
offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.
Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all
those who need us desperately.”
 Abyss ~ bottomless gulf or void
 Pestilential ~ dangerous and harmful, like a deadly
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infection
Abominable ~ nasty and disgusting
Encumbrance ~ hindrance, burden
Semblance ~ appearance, likeness
Conscientiously ~ carefully; painstakingly; thoroughly
Apathy ~ indifference; lack of emotion
Memoir ~ true account of a personal experience
 What does Madam Schachter see on the journey? How
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do her cries affect her son? Her fellow prisoners?
When the prisoners arrive at Aushwitz, what do they
see that proves Madame Schachter’s vision tragically
correct?
In the second excerpt, what does the head of Wiesel’s
block advise the prisoners to do before the selection
process? Why?
What is Akiba Drumer’s last request?
In the third excerpt, what does Juliek play at Gleiwitz?
Who is his audience?
 In the first excerpt, what do you think causes Madame
Schachter’s terrible visions?
 In the second excerpt, how has Akiba Drumer “begun
to die” when he starts to lose his faith in God? What do
you think kept Wiesel from giving up?
 At the end of the third excerpt, why do you think
Wiesel uses the metaphor of “a strange overwhelming
little corpse” to describe Juliek’s violin? Why might the
violin symbolize for Wiesel?
 What message is Wiesel communicating to us in
telling these stories of terrible human suffering? Think
of what these stories say about the power of faith, the
power of evil, and the power of art?