Examples Of Prejudice In The Book Thief

Fighting Against Hate & Intolerance in the Holocaust It is a widely known fact that eleven million people were brutally murdered in the Holocaust. Many people argue that the roots of these killings were hate and intolerance. During World War II, innumerable people were victims of Adolf Hitler’s widespread beliefs that the Aryan race was better than others. Unfortunately, they had to endure this prejudice for a very long time, but many heroes fought against these unfair views. The characters of The Book Thief, Eva’s Story, Paper Clips, and The Whispering Town all show amazing courage and cleverness when fighting against the hate and intolerance the Jews and other persecuted people endured. In The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, the main

In 1938, Eva’s home country, Austria, was invaded and her and her family became refugees. They moved to Amsterdam and hid until 1944, when they were captured. Eva went with her mother to Birkenau while her father and brother were sent to Auschwitz. Eva had to endure the harsh conditions of the death camp while trying to keep her mother and her friend safe. She showed amazing courage and cleverness, resulting in her and her mother surviving the death camp and eventually returning to Amsterdam. Though Eva fought against hate and intolerance throughout the entire Holocaust, what may be the greatest example of her fighting against it was her decision to write her autobiography and share her story. In a 2009 interview with the publisher of her book, Eva said “I wrote my story to commemorate the lives of twelve million people all over Europe who were victims of the Nazi regime… it is important for us to remember those people whose legacy disappeared from the face of the earth… Unfortunately, we have again experienced genocide around the world at the dawn of the twenty-first century: religious intolerance, hatred and discrimination that has been practiced against minority groups among us… this, most definitely, must stop” (Schloss 224). Eva’s Story has memorialized

In 1998, Linda Hooper, the principal of Whitwell middle school, asked the ELA teacher and the assistant principal to start a Holocaust education class “that would be the basis for teaching tolerance and diversity”, according to the One Clip at a Time organization. Her reason was, “When the students, mostly white and Christian, struggled to grasp the concept and enormity of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, they decided to collect six million paper clips – one for each soul who perished.” Since Whitwell was located in the heart of the Bible Belt, many of its citizens were prejudiced against the Jewish religion. Some of the citizens also didn’t know of or about the Holocaust, or some didn’t believe it happened. Over the span of four years, the students and faculty of Whitwell Middle School worked hard to teach the town and at the same time, learn themselves, about the Holocaust and invalidate the preconceptions about Jews. In doing so, the students and staff fought against intolerance and were also able to teach others all around the world with the influence of their “six million paper clips”