The Book Thief Quotes Analysis

Jennifer Riocasa

Period 2

The Power of Words

From 1941 to 1945, six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. In Nazi Germany, your identity was a big deal considering whether you live or die. Imagine yourself as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, where heaps of dead bodies lay scattered on the ground, rotting in the sun. You will be confined in a one meter by one-meter cell, large enough for only one person, but sometimes Nazis force up to four people into the tight space. In the morning they would let prisoners out to do work and only receive a ratio of food barely enough to keep each prisoner alive for the forced labor Slave labor was used as a method of torture and death is the only escape.

In the novel The Book Thief, written

The name Adolf Hitler is associated with an image of a madman in command; a man of incomprehensible “evil” who was responsible for the unimaginable suffering and death of millions of innocent people. When the German people were celebrating Hitler’s Birthday, a man in a Nazi uniform delivered a speech, ‘“The immoral! The Kommunisten!” … “Die Juden—the Jews!” (Zusak, p. 33) This quote shows that he captivated and changed people’s perspective about the Jews, and the Communists that made them the unwanted people and destroyed their lives. Words were the only thing he had to become powerful and to promise that he would remake Germany into a world power that would dominate Europe for the benefit of the German

55). The book has helped two people who are against Hitler; it helped Hans by making him appear to be a Hitler supporter, a role he has to play in order to keep himself and his family safe, and it is now helping Max by carrying both a literal and metaphorical key to his safety. The very words of the man who has made Max go into hiding is also helping to fuel his escape, how Hitler's depiction of his own struggle is indeed helping Max in his own