Before the Russians invaded Krystyna’s home, she had a happy and loving family that loved and cared for her, ‘I remember learning to walk in the warmth of the kitchen with mama leading my footsteps’ Krystyna had an innocent & naïve childhood, she lived in the moment with no worries crowding her thoughts ‘I loved to play in the orchard, climbing the apple trees or just lying in the shade listening to the birds’. Krystyna’s life had a simple regularity.
‘Then suddenly everything changed. It happened without warning and dragged us along with it’ The Russians stripped Krystyna’s family and home apart, transporting them to a Siberian labour camp called Camp Niechodaile. Krystyna’s living conditions changed significantly, there was no comfort or luxury, everyday was long and hardworking ‘those who do not work do not eat’. Months passed and people were going insane, committing suicide as ‘living had lost its meaning’. Krystyna’s family were slowly losing hope, losing Krystyna and losing life itself. Yet Krystyna never gave up hope and was determined that she would survive.
This change was important because it made Krystyna grow as a person; she gained maturity, courage and determination ‘now I needed to be an adult too’. She constantly assured herself and others that everything was going to be okay even though she had little/almost no knowledge of what was going to happen “Don’t worry mama, we must concentrate on keeping together”. This change was also important because it changed Krystyna as well as my outlook on life, showing that we must value our family, friends, home and life because you never know what tomorrow could bring ‘living each day had become a chore’.
From this novel we see that Krystyna had a wonderful and carefree life until the Russians ripped away their family, friends and every treasured possession. This change caused Krystyna to grow and become a stronger character. The inhumane conditions of the Siberian labour camp made me realise just how precious life is and that we should appreciate every second.
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
In Ruta Sepety’s Between Shades of Gray, Lina Vilkas a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian perseveres through Stalin’s cruel reign. Initially, Lina’s family is broken up and forced out of their home under the biased rule of Joseph Stalin. While at a labor camp, Lina finds out her father has died and she also falls in love with a boy named Andrius. Later Lina and her family move to a camp in Tromimousk, North Pole, there her mother dies. A doctor helps Lina. The year is now 1995 and a man finds letters of Lina’s survival and her marriage to Andrius. In the long run Lina shares her survival with the world.…
- 109 Words
- 1 Page
Good Essays -
Heda Margolius Kovaly’s Under A Cruel Star is a captivating memoir that provides historical accounts during the time period when Czechoslovakia was under Nazi control and faced with Stalinism. Kovaly gives her personal first hand accounts on experiences in concentration camps, post-war struggles, and the life that she lived while under Communism. Contrasting with Under A Cruel Star, John Merriman’s A History of Modern Europe uses clear and concise mundane facts to provide the accounts of history during this era. Presenting history in a memoir makes the read effortless and alluring but it also takes away some of the factual significance that the textbook offers. History presented in this form differs from accounts during this time era written…
- 194 Words
- 1 Page
Satisfactory Essays -
Arriving, everyone was told to take all of their clothes to take a shower with a limited time. Lina was slapped by a soviet and screamed at like she was a dog. Being treated like she was worthless and nothing. Put to work, Lina and her family only getting little portions of food to survive each day but only if they complete their work they were ordered. While working like they were ordered one day, to dig holes, a soviet came and told them to get in the holes that they dug, the soviet barking orders shot into the holes but didn’t seem to shoot them actually. Ordered to get out Lina and her mother got out and got their portion of food for the day. Her mother, always positive never seemed to be down. Trying to set good examples to the young kids trying to show them that they would get through this and they would go home but everyone knew they would never escape or be free from this. Being forced to work like slaves many people had gotten sick and ill, thinking that everything was over that they would never go home, back to their normal loving families and lives. Everyone became very…
- 675 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Lithuania's President Antanas Smetona fled from his country while nearly 150,000 troops from the Soviet Union invaded into Lithuania in 1940(Soviet Occupation). This selfish act left families like Lina Vilkas's to be captured helplessly a year later. Ruta Sepetys's book, Between Shades of Gray relates the journey and survival of Lina's family during over a year and half of being in captivity by the Soviets. As I read Between Shades of Gray, I learned that people will show great fortitude in circumstances unimaginable to normal civilians.…
- 891 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
When the word “JUDEN” had finally been plastered onto the window of their bakery, Blima knew that her life was about to change forever. This book is called The Story of Blima: A Holocaust Survivor. The Author of the story is Shirley Russak Wachtel. The book is a true story of Blima’s experiences as a young, Jewish girl in Germany. She was taken to a concentration camp. Before the Storm is all about Blima’s life before she was taken, Darkness Falls shares Blima’s story of the horrors she experienced at the concentration camps, and Daylight is when Blima is finally reconnected with some of her loved ones and her life begins to turn around for the better.…
- 907 Words
- 4 Pages
Powerful Essays -
‘Migrant Hostel’ is Skrzynecki’s account of his childhood experiences living in a migrant hostel in Parkes, where he and his mother stayed for two years after their arrival from Poland in 1949. Whilst his father worked in Sydney, he and his Mother found it very difficult to establish any sense of purpose in a place where they did not truly belong. Skrzynecki’s use of non-specific language, describing people in the camp as ‘comings’, ‘goings’, ‘newcomers’ and ‘departures’, highlights just how transient life seemed in the hostel. Day to day living was…
- 1704 Words
- 7 Pages
Better Essays -
During the late 1930’s the world was contaminated by the Second World War and the Holocaust. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Holocaust is defined as follows: “a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.” During the Holocaust, the Nazis, under the command of Adolf Hitler, liquidated over six million Jews. There is one Jewish survivor whose story especially touched my heart and changed my attitude towards life for the better. This amazing woman is Krystyna Chiger. Krystyna and her family escaped the Nazi liquidation by living in sewers for fourteen months (qtd. in “The Girl in the Green Sweater” 5). Accordingly, thorough assessments of my personal experiences according to the life lessons of Krystyna Chiger descriptively visualize the Holocaust and its everlasting impact on society.…
- 1240 Words
- 5 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Freedom. At some point in our lives we have all wanted a certain freedom. Whether it is freedom to do as you please or freedom to go explore the world. Though, most of us never got the chance to be free, and some of us might never have that chance. The book we studied in class is a classic memoir written by Elie Wiesel, a unforgettable novelist, titled Night. In this memoir Elie Wiesel is writing about his past life as a prisoner in a Jewish concentration camp along with his family. Wiesel writes about how he had suffered from being kicked out of his home in Sighet, having to split apart from his mother and his sister, Tzipora, and having to continue on to the next location with only his father by his side. Wiesel wrote about his tragedies whilst in the concentration camps; how he and his father were treated like animals because of their religion; getting beat up and abused each day. At first, reading the memoir did not interest me at all, I was bored within the first two chapters, however as I started reading more of the book I became more and more intrigued in his life tragedies. Reading about the awful events that had occurred in Wiesels’ childhood I felt heartbroken, no child or even adults should ever feel that much pain and depression from others, it is not right to be treated in such ways. I will be writing a personal response to the Elie Wiesels ‘Night’.…
- 986 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
If there was a god, why would he/she be so harsh? The text is compared to the book Night by Ellie Wiesel and from the poems “Night over Birkenau” and “Harbach 1944”. The book Night tells the story of a young boy and his father fighting for their freedom from the Nazis; Ellie Wiesel tells the story of his experience of the Holocaust. Both of the poems show the journeys of people and how they pictured all of the madness. Ellie fights through many hardships, but comes out of the Holocaust victorious! Ellie and his father were both willing and strong throughout the Holocaust, but his father escaped a different way. The theme states that during survival, people think about needs rather than wants. This is clearly developed in the poems “Night over Birkenau” By Janos Piliszky and “Harbach 1944” and Night to show harshness, survival, and fear.…
- 556 Words
- 3 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
Concentration camps showed us inhumanity on a scale previously unimagined. However the setting in place of such inhumane behaviour began some years before with the systematic dehumanising of the Jews by breaking down social structures and relationships and taking away their place in civil society. The novel shows that there is great inhumanity displayed from this personal journey of Elie Wiesel. The Jews were tortured every day for no reason at all other than for the SS officers’ own amusement. The SS officers treated the men as if they were animals, making them fight for food. Women, babies, old, sick, and handicapped were put into the crematoriums as soon as they arrived at the camps. The Germans stripped the Jews to nothing and took away everything close to them, separation from loved ones, isolation, transportation and the ruthless, cold actions towards them in the camps such as starvation and selections of the fittest. They killed people for no reason, with no remorse whatsoever. Tortures, being treated like animals, and being burned alive or killed were all things that led to the Jews feeling as if they were not human.…
- 674 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
The desire for power, fear, and self-preservation can cause people to change in ways one could not imagine. In the story, Night by Elie Wiesel, and Gerda Weissman Klein’s All But My Life, the authors share their tragic experiences from their times in Nazi concentration camps. In Addition, Klein’s All But My Life shows her experience in many different concentration camps for three years and how differently female inmates were treated than male. In Wiesel’s Night, he discusses his experience of being sent to Auschwitz along with his father for a year and how the tragedies he endured transformed his character. In Addition, Klein’s All But My Life shows her experience in many different concentration camps for three years and how differently female…
- 1298 Words
- 6 Pages
Powerful Essays -
“…Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same…
- 3314 Words
- 14 Pages
Powerful Essays -
In several instances, as Vladek recounts, the Nazis would leave notes or make announcements about certain groups of people that would soon be transported to another area, or that needed to be “registered.” These notes given to the Jewish families made the area a specific group would “relocate to” seem magnificent--an obvious lie for readers--but these so-called relocations all led to the same place: Auschwitz. For example, when the Spiegelman’s receive a notice from the Germans, they believe that those over seventy-years-old will be relocated into a nice home, “‘All Jews over 70 years old will be transferred to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on May 10, 1942…” “It doesn’t look too bad!” “Like a convalescent home”’ (86). After sending Vladek’s wife’s grandparents away, the Spiegelman’s heard that “they went right away to Auschwitz, to the gas” (87). This approach of suppressing the Jewish populations demonstrates a type of divide and conquer. The Nazis were able to take certain Jews and supervise them, before being taken to their deaths. Ultimately, this division of families caused great agony and anguish among each family member. Anja, Vladek's wife, bespeaks this suffering and distress upon understanding that her nephew will be transported to Auschwitz next as she cries, “‘My whole family is gone! Grandma and Grandpa! Poppa! Momma! Tosha! Bibi! My Richiev!!…
- 787 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
In the beginning of the 1920’s, Russia was controlled by a communist era. Everyone struggled to survive in a country they have considered their own. Parents were taken away, children were stolen from homes. Everyone was oppressed from the right to live freely. Felice Holman, author of the book the Wild Children centers her book on how the children of Russia in the 1920’s sought refuge to survive and pushed through the limitation of childhood caused by societal revolution especially in this period where vulnerability for children is very evident. Wild Children talks about Peter and Alex that in the midst of a land deprived from liberty for children, these two characters rose to the precipice of the unknown and risked their own freedom to help and lead the wild children of Russia escape to the land of freedom.…
- 668 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
S. A Novel about the Balkans, by Slavenka Drakulic, is a story about a Bosnian woman, named S., who was tortured by the hands of brutal soldiers during the Bosnia war. The novel mainly centers on a series of S.’s flashbacks, as she recounts the horrific ill-treatment she endured throughout this time period. Through telling S’s story, the author creates a vivid image of how deep and dark human nature is during wartime. The story is a revelation of the terrifying aspects of war, which include torture, rape and mass murdering/genocide by the occupying forces. Slavenka Drakulic’s story depicts how S. rose above the war crimes and on top of injustice to show the true meaning of human life. During war, almost all men and women involved suffer immensely, however, as portrayed in the novel S., women suffer more through mistreatment, sexual abuse, mishandling and irreversible traumas acted upon by the inhumane soldiers. The events that occurred in Bosnia during the 1990’s will go down in history as one of the most inhuman and cruel time periods ever. Through the character S.,…
- 2117 Words
- 9 Pages
Powerful Essays