The story begins with Georg Rauch getting drafted into the German Army of the Nazi party. It’s pretty uncomfortable for him, and he tries all he can to be released by the military. From disobeying to outright telling his superiors that he is a quarter Jew. I wish I read more of the book. I just cannot find it as interesting as I thought I would. I picked it out because I thought that a Jewish man in the Nazi Army would be cool to read about, but most of the book is him serving as a plain old soldier, and no one cares that he’s Jewish. The soldiers who are in his group, some of them Jews just like him, also don’t get mistreated by the other soldiers. Most of his group seem to be nonchalant about being in the same company with a Jew, despite the ideology that Hitler tried to impel them to follow. …show more content…
That’s what is intriguing about this third of the book, is that it seems that his Judaism does not affect his life as a soldier, except maybe him being sent to the front and not released from duty. In fact, the only time he went to a camp is when he was sent to a labor camp after being captured by Russians. In the camp section of this book, the letters he used to write to his mother cease, obviously due to his imprisonment. Rauch went on to spend the remainder of World War II in the Russian camp. The part of the novel in which Rauch lives in the labor camp is interesting, because it is a labor camp, yet Rauch is more welcome there than in Nazi Germany. The final segment is Rauch's long trek back to his home in Vienna to check on his family's well being. This travel back home is a great way for this tale to conclude. The emotions that Rauch conveys in this message show that he is indeed