Daniel's Story By Carol Matas

Imagine having to fight for everything, never being able to rest. How would you feel if everything you had ever known was stripped away until you had to fight for your basic necessities? This is what happened in the Holocaust. All Jewish people had to fight for survival and their basic necessities. Even when fighting as hard as they could, most did not survive. They had to be smart, and in Daniel’s Story by Carol Matas, Daniel’s father is an excellent example of what it means to be smart. Father was intelligent, and seemed to instinctively know how to survive. When Daniel and his family were in the Lodz ghetto, Father knew how to keep them warm so they did not freeze. He knew that staying informed of the events happening around them by radio

To combat this fact, Daniel’s father refused to hand in their radio when all radios were banned from being possessed by a Jewish person. Their radio was a sign of defiance and hope. It was a sign of resistance for Daniel and often more important than food for many people. When Daniel and his family got deported to Lodz, they could not bring the radio they had with them as they would be searched, but Daniel’s father knew exactly how to get a new one for their ‘home’ in Lodz. “But when we arrived in Lodz, one of the first things he did was trade a box of noodles for a radio from a local resident.” (Matas 43) Even though owning a radio in the ghetto was very illegal, Daniel’s father did it anyway. Hope stemmed from the radio and even though Father knew that if it were to be discovered they would all be killed he also knew that hope was one of the most important things for his family. “But he also knew that hope was as important as bread–perhaps more important.” (Matas 43) The radio gave them the ability to know what was going on in the outside world, to keep up with the movements of the war. It helped their family feel as though they still had dignity; that their small act of resistance was defying the Nazis and the rules they put in place. The radio offered glimpses of the outside world, providing hope and a sense of possibility of a better life for Daniel and his family. The radio helped Daniel and his family fight to continue living in the horrid conditions of the ghetto and continue to have the resilience and courage to stay