Close Reading of Memoir by Avraham Tory In Lithuania during the 1940s, there lived a Jewish lawyer named Avraham Tory who risked his life by documenting the horrors and harsh truths of the events that’s occurred in the Kovno ghetto much in part due to the idea of “bearing witness.” Aside from documenting the nightmares of the ghetto, Avraham Tory wrote daily entries in his diary, Surviving the Holocaust: the Kovno Ghetto Diary, describing interactions between Nazi officers and leaders and specific atrocities which he bared witness. Over the duration of Avraham Tory’s time spent in the Kovno ghetto, his goal was to record and document these events and to create a certain memorial of Jewish character and the community of the Kovno Jews that …show more content…
He presents his memoir this way because there is no way for language to adequately describe the terror. Furthermore, language depicting feelings cannot properly bear witness so that is why it is not present. Rather Memoir, and this selected passage is written bluntly describing the torment of the Holocaust. The sense of verbal language and body language found within this piece were powerful despite being very simple. The right or left was known to all as the difference between life and death. “All this trash to the left” and “All this pile of garbage goes to the right was the type of bitterness that the victims of the ghetto had to face and is portrayed thoroughly by …show more content…
“Throughout the selection he did not exhibit any sign of fatigue or sensitivity at the wailing, please, and cries, or at the sight of the heartrending spectacles which took place before his eyes when children were separated form their parents, or parents form their children, or husbands and wives from each other- all those tragedies did not penetrate his heart at all.” This choiceless choice was an event that Avraham Tory bore witness to and could never be forgiven. The pure evil of the Rauca as indicated by his “scornful smile” is the useless cruelty that the community had to