Blog Post #1 Henry Motew

A part of the book that is really gut wrenching for me is the whole beginning. The sense of Gerda's family not having any clue of what will happen to them. Her family and everyone in their neighborhood being so clueless just shows how awful the Holocaust really was. You realize the innocence of the people and the shock that they felt when people would find themselves in concentration camps watching their fellow Jews and friends being executed. In All but My Life, at the beginning of Gerda's story, you hear some people telling Gerda and Arthur, Gerda's brother, that they are going to be sent to "camps" and killed. They simply resented what he said, they thought he was a maniac and never realized the truth that he was saying. Another example that shows how clueless people were about the Holocaust was when Gerda was going with Mr. Pipersberg, Gerda's father's close friend and business associate, to the factory and Gerda said "You know they wouldn't do anything to me" and Mr. Pipersberg agreed and let her go with. It just shows how Gerda has absolutely no clue what is going to happen to her later in her life and that she has no way to find out what will happen and no way to prevent it. I think the innocence of the people sent to concentration camps is one of the things that is so upsetting because it is like capturing a flightless, injured bird, just plain wrong.