Obstacles Children Faced In The Book Thief

Everyone has to overcome obstacles sometime in their life. During the Holocaust, Jews had to overcome many more struggles and obstacles than the average person. The average person’s everyday struggles might be having their computer occasionally crash, or tripping over a rock. During the Holocaust and World War 2, the Jews had much bigger troubles. Jews in Holocaust children’s books, The Book Thief, the movie Paper Clips, and The Diary of Anne Frank all had to overcome many struggles in everyday life. Jews in children’s books related to the Holocaust had to overcome many obstacles. For example, a children’s book called The Whispering Town says “We’ve heard rumors that someone is hiding Jews on this street….When we find them, we will arrest everyone” (Elvgren, the picture where the Nazis are at Annet’s house and asking her if they are hiding any Jews). Annet and her family had to overcome the struggle of keeping the Jews hidden and the Jews that were being hidden had to be quiet so that they would not be

An example of an obstacle that helpers of Jews had to overcome is not being to tell anybody that they were hiding Jews. In The Book Thief, Hans Hubermann, the main character’s father, says “Liesl [the main character], if you tell anybody about the man up there, we will all be in big trouble...at the very least, Mama and I will be taken away” (Zusac, 203). During the Holocaust, Jews were often marched from concentration camp to concentration camp in inhumane conditions with little food. Markus Zusac mentions this in The Book Thief when he says “They watched the Jews come down the road like a catalog of colors...hunger ate them as they continued forward...some looked appealingly at those who had come to observe their humiliation, this prelude to their deaths” (Zusac, 391-392). In The Book Thief, millions of Jews and hundreds of helpers of Jews had to overcome many