We are nearing the end of the book now, and we should be finishing it tonight.
In class today, we discussed how going through such traumatic events with a person close to the individual could either strengthen or break their relationship. It all comes down to an impossible choice--would you abandon your father so you could survive or bear the burden even though it would weigh down both your chances of survival? In The Last Days, Bill Basch had to make such a decision. As an innocent young boy, he promised his friend that they would always stay together no matter what happened. But on a death march, his friend hurt his leg, and a SS officer was going to kill him. Basch and another friend stepped up to protect the hurt friend, but under threat of death, they did the unthinkable; They abandoned him. To this day, Basch is still haunted by this event. It was more than cruel to force these impossible choices on young children. And for all the people who were victims of the Holocaust, this became their normal life.
We also discussed some really powerful quotes in the book. There was a victim in the hospital who said that he had more faith in Hitler than anyone else because Hitler kept his promises to the Jews. The Jews had been let down by everyone else, even God. This is a poignant and revealing statement, and it makes me wonder why we did not do more to help them. Hitler had laid his promises out in full view of the world. Could no one have stopped him?
Something else I thought was really disturbing was the experiments doctors were doing on the Jews. They would try to see if eye color or height could be changed, and many of the people they experimented on ended up with grotesque deformities. After they were done, the Jews would be sent to gas chambers and disposed of. Some doctors tried to save the Jews, but the only way to do that was to keep performing tests on them. I find that rather ironic and extremely sickening.