Quiz 2 Essay Question PDF

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Professor Grae Sibelman...

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Quiz 2: Fragments of Memory Fragments of Memory definitely differs from This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in the way of perspective. As we discussed in class, Borowski, as a non-Jew who had a different (and perhaps “privileged” in some ways) role in the camp often wrote from an outsider’s view. His narration seems more objective and detached than Greenfield’s at times, as she writes of her own personal experiences, the intimate connections and losses that she had with loved ones, and her personal journey throughout the Holocaust. I was reminded of This Way for the Gas, however, when Greenfield was describing the march of the 1,100 children into the Terezin ghetto. Her view of the children, as well as the view of the artists whose renditions she includes in the book, is similar to Borowski’s at this moment; she is staring at them from afar, wondering about their fates and taking them in as a large mass of people who she doesn’t really know. Instead of individuals, they appear more like a large cluster of victims – this is reminiscent of Borowski’s description of the people that his main character unloads from the train, for example. She does bear witness to the suffering of others rather than fixating solely on her own, which I think Borowski often does as well. She describes, for example, the death of her starving friend in her bunk, the violent whipping of a fellow female slave-laborer, etc. just as Borowski describes his view of other inmates being beaten, gassed, etc. Overall, however, I think that the tone of Fragments is more aligned with that of Night; Elie’s novel, too, is a description of his own personal horrors and experiences. He provides the sort of details that Greenfield often does, such as the name of his hometown, individuals that he encountered along the way, etc. Greenfield’s fixation on and description of her mother’s death also reminded me of Elie’s meditation on his relationship with, as well as the death of, his father. For both authors, it seems that the loss of these parental figures stands out as a massive monument in the story of their lives, a marker of their suffering during the Holocaust and a tragedy to which they often return. Elie spends many pages ruminating on the guilt that he associates with his father’s death, while Greenfield describes her trip back to Auschwitz, where she collects ashes from inside the gas chamber where her mother perished as a sort of memorial. Deepening the difference between Fragments and This Way to the Gas is the element of hope or some measure of optimism that is present in Greenfield’s narrative, which I think Borowski’s is mostly devoid of. Greenfield describes the restoration of her faith in humanity, for example, when the elderly couple helps her, as well as a measure of healing and solace that fellow survivors have accomplished by revisiting the sites of their suffering and their hometowns, investigating the deaths of their loved ones, and mourning them. Yet in form, Fragments is obviously more similar to This Way to the Gas. While Borowski’s short stories are fictitious renditions on his real experiences, Greenfield’s are stories derived directly from her life experiences; however, both authors format their books as a collection of shorter pieces, more like a collage of interlocking aspects of suffering that the reader must piece together rather than Night’s single, unified, chronological narrative. Borowski and Greenfield both jump around in time, location, and subject matter, and sometimes a story does not immediately seem directly related to the one that preceded it. I think that Fragments is set apart from both of the other novels in other aspects as well; Greenfield’s narration style mingles photographs, relics, and artwork with her words, as well as

a description of the in-depth investigation she conducted in order to ascertain the circumstances of her mother’s death to the best of her ability. Fragments seems to play with form in a more varied, diverse way in this sense. Additionally, Greenfield’s novel gives us the most in-depth account of her experience after the Holocaust – while Borowski and Wiesel both describe their liberation and the reader is given some insight into their eventual fate, Greenfield dedicates perhaps almost as much time, in my opinion, to describing the remnants of the Holocaust and how this experience shaped the course of her life afterwards as she does to describing the experiences that took place within it. Greenfield, for example, offers the reader descriptions of her return to her hometown in Czechoslovakia, her return to Auschwitz and the Terezin ghetto, and her interaction with fellow survivors. We are also shown the ways that her narrative has impacted fellow survivors and their family members, which is unique to the other two novels as well. Greenfield describes the way in which her investigation into the fate of the 1,100 children, as well as her mother, eventually led to the children of the lost adults, and even a parent of one of the lost children, discovering the true circumstances of their loved ones’ death....