Reading Log 4
This reading log is on chapter 5. The title is �The Camps: A Surreal Suffering�. Already by reading the title I began to become nervous. I knew that in this chapter Birger would be talking about the concentration camps in detail, because of the title of course. Birger explains the horrible conditions in the railway cars. The temperature was so hot because it was the summer and there were so many people packed into the cars that it was impossible to sit down. The whole car only had one bucket to use as a lavatory; the smell became unbearable for the passengers. The Jews arrived at the Dachau Concentration Camp where they worked as slave laborers. Birger and everyone else were also stamped with random numbers from a number machine which became their new names/identities. Birger was D5046. He mentions how people in the concentration camps would constantly have to tell themselves over a hundreds times a day that �they would survive� so that they could psychologically stay sane. If the prisoners wanted to survive, they needed to get food. However, if caught they would be killed at the spot. It was a really big dilemma. Birger would have been sent to the �sick block� if the French doctor who examined the Jews did not conceal the fact that Birger was not good to continue working.
This chapter was filled with so much I almost did not know what to talk about. First of all the work that the Jewish prisoners had to perform were crazy. The conditions of living were terrible. They were not properly fed and many did not have the energy to continue working because they were so starved. Birger risked his life by running and grabbing several potatoes. However those potatoes were helpful and kept his family�s thoughts away from the desperate hunger for several days. As I was reading the conditions and how the Jews had to do things to survive another day, and keep themselves mentally and physically well, my heart really went out to them.
I think that in this chapter, Birger�s heart is really into what he is writing. He starts off with the powerful paragraph of his memory of seeing his mother haunting him. It must have been so tough knowing how she was just rooting for him to survive and live for her. I think that his mother was the reason that Birger was enduring all the horribleness of the concentration camp. I think that he was doing as she said and surviving, surviving so that he can be a vessel to spread knowledge of this time period and how is was like to be a Jewish person living through the horrors of the holocaust.
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� Annie Kim 2005