Comparing The Book Thief And The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum

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The Holocaust is a notorious event during World War II where six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. In “The Book Thief”, written my Markus Zusak, and the “Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum”, by Michael Kimmelman, both seek to engage and educate the citizens all around the world about the horrors of the Holocaust; however, they teach about the Holocaust from different perspectives.
To start with, “The Book Thief” was a fictional book taking place during the Holocaust and WWII. What makes this book so interesting is that it was told in the perspective of Death as if Death was a human being, so the audience gets the portray through Death’s “eyes” himself. Stated by Death, the narrator of “The Book Thief,” “They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.” This implied that so many people were dying at such a rapid speed, especially by adding, “Minute after minute” (Death). …show more content…

Taking a different approach to showing the multitudes of victims that were murdered, to show the mere scale of the whole thing, they retell the story of the Holocaust through the items found in the camp. Once belonging to the innocent people trying to survive in those camps, they use the objects left behind to portray how the camp really worked and what the people had to suffer through. “...Occupying some of the same barracks or blocks, will retain the piled hair and other remains, which by now have become icons, as inextricable from Auschwitz as the crematoria and railway tracks,” stated in “Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum”. They want to focus on the mass victimhood, not highlighting individual stories just as “The Book Thief”