A Wish of Rain :: Essays Papers

A Wish of Rain Close your eyes and imagine, he told us. Imagine it is late(a) at night. A train pulls up to the place where you are standing. The doors kick in and the hundreds of people who were standing inside begin to jump down. A puppyish Jewish boy of sixteen and his family are among this tired, hungry, beaten crowd. Eventually, they are quarantined into two lines the boy and his father are pushed into one line, his overprotect and baby into the other. Then they are marched off into the night.I was never to see my mother and sister again. I was in the line to live.The speaker, a survivor of the Holocaust, told his fiction and many more one bright, warm summer day at Birkenau, a concentration bivouacking in Poland. His audience of American students listened delighted and horrified as he told of his struggles to stay alive in the camp during World War II, the struggles of six million Jews caught up in the terror.I remember wishing it would rain.That day at Birkenau held no warmth or brightness. It was a day of realizations and acceptances. In a way, it marked a career from innocence and naivety to a greater understanding of human nature. For me, on that point were no more denials.I had always known about the Holocaust, compensate before I to a faultk the literature course that would bring me to Poland, yet deep-down I could never truly accept it. I found it difficult to deliberate that one man in his hatred of all that was good and enough could condemn a people to death or that a state could stand blindly by and let it happen. I wanted to take in human compassion and understanding. Thus, it was easy to pretend that the stories were exaggerated or sensationalized.Now, I feel as though I know too much. I never thought I could get so emotionally involved, but after living closely with it for three weeks, I could non help but become involved. It became increasingly more difficult to disavow or to remain detached once the truth began to unfold. I did not like the feelings it evoked in me or the unanswered questions it left me with. My encephalon balked. Yet, to run my hand over the wooden bunks in the barracks, to walk on the same hard-packed earth, to look out over barbed-wire fences and empty guard towers and only to know that I stood in the spot where they breathed their last, I believed.