Ellie was sent to a concentration and a death camp in Hitler’s Germany during WWII because he was Jewish. He survived ; his father did not. He tells a most important historical event through the eyes of one who lived it, who starved through it, who died inside because of it. He tells it well.
Adolf Hitler determined that all Jewish people were corrupting his idea of perfect race. Hitler was a madman. He killed 6 million Jewish men, women, and children, old and young alike and many more of various races and reasons. Many of the German people during WWII went along with him either out of fear , ignorance or hunger for power; and some helped the people whom Hitler targeted. “War is like an x-ray” I cannot remember who said it, but it is painfully true. It reveals what is inside each of us. Is there good or evil? War will tell us.
We must remember the Holocaust. We must read and learn and not forget the terrible crimes committed against the Jewish people, especially now, as painful and difficult as it is to remember that humanity could be so cruel and inhumane to other humans. If we forget; God help us all. We cannot forget the evil that lies within us. and we cannot stop asking God to remove it. In his time in the concentration camps, Ellie lost his faith and abandoned the idea of an Almighty God, his question – Where was God? I get it, I do not judge him, or critisize him. When we suffer, we ask; when we suffer we lose faith and sometimes we reject God, we blame him. I think in some ways that is why God came to us, broken and bloody and then died. He came so we could blame him and we did. We all did.
We are so weak, we are so frail and fragile.
The Art Place 