1) Home
What images and memories does the author associate with his hometown/country? What feelings does he have about home?
Arthur Ney, the author of “W Hour”, is a holocaust survivor who was 9 years old when German forces invaded his home Country: Poland. Many of the author’s memories are of his family, Arthur’s upbringing was mainly a product of his extended family, as opposed to his immediate family. Arthur’s parents were absent for most his childhood
Once the war broke out, how was the author’s sense of home disrupted in the town or community?
Arthur’s recollection of the German invasion of Poland was the first disruption to the author’s sense of home seen in the memoir. In Warsaw, Arthur’s hometown, the imprisonment inside the ghettos was the “beginning of the end” . While being held in the ghettos, inflation rose for chemical products, this caused the author’s family’s dry cleaning business to go under.
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Jewish men and women are portrayed similarly to rats in Nazi propaganda, sneaking everywhere, stealing, and spreading disease. Nazi propaganda was effective because it began desensitising the inhumanity of the Jews to the christian populus. Furthermore, Jewish people are portrayed as: short, dirty, and hairy, further subhumanizing the jews and adding to the morality behind the genocide.
How did these elements legitimize the systemic dehumanization of jews.
Convincing the German people that Jews were subhuman was vital to the dehumanization, and ultimately, the attempted elimination of the Jewish People. To add, associating the jewish people with rats and other forms of vermin sparked fear regarding public health and safety within communities, communities that had already been convinced that the jews are responsible for ruining the German economy.
3) Survival
Did the author received any help to survive?