Chapter 8

Last chapter I discussed how it must have been hard for the Blumenthals being referred to as 'refugees', and this chapter starts out talking about how they have a new name, 'displaced persons.' It shows that this must have been something that they thought about.
What I remember most from this chapter is how Ruth was feeling so worried about caring for her two children all alone now that Walter had passed. Ruth felt that the children needed to be schooled, so the kids went away to school and Ruth stayed in Amsterdam. This must have been very hard for them to do. They had just lost Walter, and now they had to split up. It was a big sacrifice each made to better their lives. Ruth knew the kids needed education and this was very important, but I wonder if the children understood the importance of this over the need for them to be apart. Marion talks about how she missed her mother so much, but she had learned to suppress her feelings, and this is how she made it through.
I found it interesting to learn of Marions left over anxieties from living in the camps and how this effected her time in the hospital to get her eyes fixed. Her uncle had offered to pay for this surgery, and she was very sorry for the way she behaved, but everyone understood that this was not all Marions fault, that she had been through some horrific times that made her act this way.
All of these feelings created from going through such a horrific experience might be a good learning moment for students. This chapter is about how the survivors of the Holocaust try to live on and make a new life for themselves, but that can be very hard to do after experiencing such hardship at the hands of others. We could discuss as a class the feelings, sadness, anxieties, hardships, and difficulties that the Blumenthals experienced after the war and Holocaust, and how they got through. This could be related to how people have dealt with other traumatic experiences such as soldiers in the Iraq war and survivors of natural disasters. The Blumenthals were lucky because they had people in Holland to stay with, but not all the survivors did. It would be a good research project for students to find out what these people did.
I was feeling very sentimental at the end of the chapter when they reach the US and see the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of freedom. It was very emotional.
Difficult words in this chapter were: displaced persons, stateless, cloister. luxurious, chignon, rationed, convalescent, Bar Mitzvah, afoot, aliyah