I watched a movie today from 1999 that I’d heard about. Starring Kirsten Dunst before her Spiderman fame. She was a young Jewish woman who didn’t understand the traditions nor the reasons why she had to attend the ceremonial gatherings until she’s magically transported back to 1941 where she faces the Nazis and dies in a gas chamber only to wake up back in modern times. I thought it was well done. I’ll definitely say that much of the Nazi depictions were glossed over for the sake of audiences.

Someone who didn’t gloss anything over was Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. She’s the author of Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land. She doesn’t gloss anything over. She’s real, genuine, and lets the horror speak for itself. It’s very bold, just like the author, and states truly what living in Auschwitz was like and what dying in Auschwitz was like.

She was arrested first because she was a member of the Nazi resistance and sent to jail. From jail, she was sent to Auschwitz but not until late in 1943-44. So she caught the last push of the Nazis to kill as many Jews as possible, overwhelming the crematoriums so much so that they resorted to just burning people alive in the trenches.

This class I took in the first semester of my Junior year transformed me. I had hoped to get pointers on how to do a really great memoir or diary. I’m not sure I realized what studying Holocaust memoirs would be like.

Another example of a chilling retelling of Holocaust survival is Elie Wiesel’s Night. I believe this one is just as horrific as Sara Nomberg’s but while Sara was in the women’s prison, closer to the trenches and the crematoriums, Elie Wiesel and his father were in the men’s area from 1944 – 45.

Both memoirs read like a collection of essays set in chronological order. They are honest and I could only imagine what writing them must have been like for both survivors. Because both Nomberg and Wiesel survived the Holocaust. I wondered if writing it down was like getting the dirty, gritty trauma out or if it was more like reliving a nightmare and putting it all on paper so others can live it too. However the authorship affected them, the testimony of what they went through is harrowing and each of them focuses on certain topics. Sara Nomberg focuses on mothers and children while Elie Wiesel focuses on the relationship to fathers and sons as well as how he was forced to literally told again and again to turn his back on his father so he could survive.

There are many, many memoirs and I’ve ready only a few but these are three, including one I mentioned in the previous post, that really stood out to me. I’m still trying to catch up on all I ignored to finish up my last semester and once I can catch up, I hope to start pursuing certificates and perhaps even playing around with another nation’s version of Adobe where I can afford to publish my next book in the Dorian series. It just feels like adulthood is a series of choices to delay enjoyment and gratification until I get all my work done. Nothing at all like I was promised when people would tell me I’d be so happy to be an adult.