Name : Aom

Class : 1206

Date : 30 Nov 2016

The shawl research project

Six million people were perished their life in the flames of holocaust. The shawl by

Cynthia Ozick, is set in Europe during the second world war. A group of Nazi was led by

Adolf Hitler decided to exterminated the Jewish people in Europe whose they portray them

as a trouble maker. The author illustrated the horrors of life in concentration camp during

the holocaust through a fictional short story. However, it is a realistic depiction of conditions

in a concentration camp.

The author illustrates how terrible of holocaust during the war trough the

protagonist, Rosa. On the march to concentration camp, she was carrying her baby,

Magda, in the shawl while having Stella, a 14-years-old daughter, walking along her side.

When she arrived, she hid the baby in the barrack to avoid her from being killed by the

soldiers. During the day, Rosa came back to feed a baby by her dried-up nipples even she

was exhausted from working. With jealousy, Stella desired to kill her sister by pulling the

shawl out. Suddenly, Magda came out from the barrack and being thrown to electric fence.

Cynthia Ozick is a jewish short story writer who tried to reflect the dreadfulness in

concentration camp by capturing the insignificant events that people disregarded it.

Comparing to the reality, that situation was depicted as horror in nowadays.

 Firstly, In the past, gender inequality was extremely affected in society especially in

the second world war. Women were being under controlled by the mens power.

Consequently, treatment of the woman was unequal at that time. In the concentration

camp, disable women were separated and killed while others were forced to serve sex

desire for the soldiers.

According to the research, author mentioned that The brothels were seen as

serving several needs including meeting the sexual needs of soldiers placed far from

home, or in occupied lands, reducing the enticement of having sexual relations with impure

local women or forced labourers, 1 which referred to the story, when Rosa was on the

march and looked at her baby ,She looked into Magdas face through a gap in the shawl:

a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawls

windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosas bleak

complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as air,

smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn in to Rosas coat. You could

think she was one of their babies, (the shawl, page 1)

As the statement, Magda personalised differently form her mom, Rosa. Moreover, Stella

realised who is her sister. She held her eyes open every moment, forgetting how to blink

or nap, and Rosa and sometimes Stella studied their blueness. On the road they raised

one burden of a leg after another and studied Magdas face. Aryan, Stella said, (the

1 Jewish women's sexual behaviour and sexualized abuse during the Nazi eraBeverley Chalmers -
The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality - 2015
shawl, page 1) Based on the evidence, the story describes that the jewish infant was a

result from getting raped by the Nazis soldier.

Secondly, the march shows how terrible the living condition was. When the

prisoners were transferred, they have experienced many hardships during the way to the

concentration camp. The guard strictly ordered to kill the prisoner who could not walk to

the destination. Many people died from exhaustion, starvation and exposure which

increased the number of death along the way. Based on the research, During these death

marches, the SS guards brutally mistreated the prisoners. Following their explicit orders,

they shot hundreds of prisoners who collapsed or could not keep pace on the march, or

who could no longer disembark from the trains or ships, 2 the soldiers ended prisoners life

cruelty by shooting them.

Nazi located this camp in the deep of Germany to guarantee that they can produce their

armaments and the prisoners will not be fallen to enemys hands. As the researcher said,

The camp location, amid forests and lakes, was chosen by Heinrich Himmler because it

was far enough away for people not to know about it, yet within reach of the railway station

at Fursten- burg, 3

2 Manya Friedman: Death March to Ravensbruck United

States ...https://www.ushmm.org/mobile/blog_entry/3787

3 Sebba, A. (n.d.). Women of Ravensbruck. The Site of the Concentration Camp near Berlin
Remains Little Known.
This applied to the story, Rosa and Magda took a long way on the marching It was a

magic shawl, it could nourish an infant for three days and three nights, Magda stayed on

the shawl for three days three night and had nothing to eat. According to the story, Rosa

did not feel hunger; she felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in

trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing

everything, but in the air, not there, not touching the road (The shawl, page 1) this

statement can be seen that Rosa was starving. Her body was turning very light and thin

from tiredness throughout the three days.

Thirdly, the treatment of children reflects cruel of Nazi who killed approximately 1.5

million children. In the era of holocaust, Over millions of them were Jewish and others were

Gypsy, disable German children and etc. The adolescents who had ages between 13-18

got a great chance to survive for being a labour. Most of them were forced to used in

medical experiment. For infants, they were immediately sent to be killed in gas chamber

and the killing centre. Based on the research, the researcher mentioned that Children

born in ghettos and camps who survived because prisoners hid them 4

Comparing to the story, Rosa hid her in the barracks, under the shawl, but she knew that

one day someone would inform;(the shawl, page 2) In the concentration camp, there are

full of dangerous. Rosa necessarily hid her baby in the barrack, the only safe place for

protecting her from prisoners and soldiers. Moreover, living condition of the prisoners was

4 Children during the Holocaust - United States

Holocaust ...https://secure.ushmm.org/wlc/es/article.php?ModuleId=10005142
very terrible. Many people were staying together in the narrow space of barrack, which is a

sort of dirty animals. In each barrack, 700 people were assigned without any facilities.

Consequently, Many prisoners was suffering with diarrhea.

As a result, the author mentioned, She lived that long, but she did not walk very

well, partly because she was only fifteen months old, and partly because the spindles of

her legs could not hold up her fat belly. It was fat with air, full and round, (the shawl, page

1) Magda had bad health condition and not developed herself in the way normal children

should be.

In conclusion, The shawl by Cynthia Ozick reflects dark side experience in

holocaust during the second World War, which is the unforgettable pain in jewishs mind.

The prisoners in concentration camp were harmed and killed in both mental and physical

ways including gender inequality, the march and treatment of children. Most of them were

expressed through the fictional. In the same way, this is the real event that happened with

prisoners. Finally, even this significant event has already passed for almost 70 years but it

had never gone from peoples mind.

barracks

starvation

woman
- the Nazis banned the fledgling womens rights movements of the Weimar years, and integrated
the hundreds of womens groups and organizations that characterized this decade into a single
unified Nazi Womens Front, ultimately led by a Nazi enthusiast,
- in his work evaluating couples racial and hereditary suitability for marriage, less than 5
percent of the men and women he interviewed turned out to have been virgins. Most had begun
to have inter- course in their late teens and early twenties, approximately seven years before
they had married. . . .the majority had had more than one premarital partner
- The brothels were seen as serving several needs including meeting the sexual needs of soldiers
placed far from home, or in occupied lands, reducing the enticement of having sexual relations
with impure local women or forced labourers, as well as serving as treatment for homosexuality
among male prisoners
- Brothels were also used as incentives for higher productivity from prisoners in camps. Women
serving as sex workers in these brothels were recruited, sometimes voluntarily, but often by
force.
- vast numbers of naked women in camps.
- Nazi ideology regarding Jews generally depicted them as deceptive, evil, cunning, lowly forms of
life, to be feared for their infecting and polluting intentions and abilities.
- Die Su nde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood) (Burleigh & Wipperman, 1991) relating
the story of a blond haired German women who had married a Jewish man and whose offspring
were forever contaminated. Julius Streicher (of anti-Semitic Der Stu rmer fame) also published
in a semi-medical journal German Peoples Health that he edited, that Jewish sperm
contaminated German womens blood with one encounter able to infiltrate her bloodstream
having permanent dire consequences (Liverpool, 1954).
- Hitlers views on this were reported in Mein Kampf (1939) where he depicted the Jewish youth
lying in wait for an unsuspecting girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood.
- Jews were also accused of spreading disease (Glass, 1997) and homosexuality (Kater, 1989).
- Although religious marriages were not allowed, the Judenrat or Jewish Councils that enforced
German rule in the ghettos took on the task of solemnising marriages. Celebra- tions were held
clandestinely and were simple in nature, but still occurred with love and happiness
- holocaust memorial museum

4.
By

6.
- Around 30,000 to 50,000 people were killed there
- it was a place of punishment, which provided slave labour to some of the thousands of sub-
camps fuelling the Nazi war machine, the most notorious being the Siemens and Halske plazz.
- It was also the scene of horrific medical experimentation on young Polish women, known as
lapins (guinea pigs), some of whom had their legs cut open and infected with bacteria and glass
shards to simulate the effect of shrapnel.
- Today there is a visitor centre and a building known as the Bunker the prison cells within the
camp used for additional punishment and torture has been refurbished. The crematorium
remains untouched.
- Berlin has done much to draw atten- tion to its Jewish past, with stolperstein plaques embedded
in pavements recording former Jewish inhabitants mur- dered by the Nazis, memorial signposts
in the former Jewish quarter and even pictures in some train stations of well- known Jews who
once lived in that area.
- Vigilance is our absolute duty. Evil can return at any time, and we are not allowed to forget what
happened here.

7.
- Dachau opened in 1933 and was initially used to house political prisoners. It later became a
training facility for the SS, the elite Nazi military force responsible for planning and executing the
Final Solution, or the annihilation of the Jews. An estimated 41,500 prisoners were murdered
there. Some went to the gas chambers, or were shot or beaten to death; others expired from
exposure or starvation, or died subsequent to medical experiments conducted by SS doctors.
- The violence has been described before in Holocaust and World War II literature, but typically as
heat-of-the-moment violence, unthinking blows struck, in the words of one U.S. military judge-
advocate, in the light of the conditions which greeted the eyes of the rst combat troops. What
sets Wilseys account apart, then, is that his unit didnt arrive until three to four days after the
 camp was liberated. The combat engineer using his canteen was not a soldier on a battle eld but
a grieving, shell-shocked veteran con- ducting an extralegal revenge execution.
-
woman
- the Nazis banned the fledgling womens rights movements of the Weimar years, and integrated
the hundreds of womens groups and organizations that characterized this decade into a single
unified Nazi Womens Front, ultimately led by a Nazi enthusiast,
- in his work evaluating couples racial and hereditary suitability for marriage, less than 5
percent of the men and women he interviewed turned out to have been virgins. Most had begun
to have inter- course in their late teens and early twenties, approximately seven years before
they had married. . . .the majority had had more than one premarital partner
- The brothels were seen as serving several needs including meeting the sexual needs of soldiers
placed far from home, or in occupied lands, reducing the enticement of having sexual relations
with impure local women or forced labourers, as well as serving as treatment for homosexuality
among male prisoners
- Brothels were also used as incentives for higher productivity from prisoners in camps. Women
serving as sex workers in these brothels were recruited, sometimes voluntarily, but often by
force.
- vast numbers of naked women in camps.
- Nazi ideology regarding Jews generally depicted them as deceptive, evil, cunning, lowly forms of
life, to be feared for their infecting and polluting intentions and abilities.
- Die Su nde wider das Blut (The Sin Against the Blood) (Burleigh & Wipperman, 1991) relating
the story of a blond haired German women who had married a Jewish man and whose offspring
were forever contaminated. Julius Streicher (of anti-Semitic Der Stu rmer fame) also published
in a semi-medical journal German Peoples Health that he edited, that Jewish sperm
contaminated German womens blood with one encounter able to infiltrate her bloodstream
having permanent dire consequences (Liverpool, 1954).
- Hitlers views on this were reported in Mein Kampf (1939) where he depicted the Jewish youth
lying in wait for an unsuspecting girl whom he plans to seduce, adulterating her blood.
- Jews were also accused of spreading disease (Glass, 1997) and homosexuality (Kater, 1989).
-

-march