Daniel's Story
By Carol Matas
Plot
Daniel is an average 14 year old Jew who is on a train with his sister, mother, and father. He doesn't know where he is going. Soon he arrives in a Ghetto called Lodz. Lodz keeps getting smaller and smaller. One night he tries to escape and is caught. He is shoved on another train and has no idea he is heading to Auschwitz. Auschwitz is a concentration camp. His mother and her friend are very sick when they arrive and might not make it out alive. Soon after that they are forced to march for seven days to their final consentration camp, Buchenwald.
Theme
I think that at the theme of this story is never give up hope. In the story Daniel had to overcome lots of obstacles. First when he was in lodz he was struggling for survival. He had to go to two concentration camps and his mother and best friend died. But through it all he never gave up hope.
Research
Lodz is a ghetto in Poland. A ghetto is something Nazis used to contain Jews. There were 356 ghettos that the Nazis built. The ghetto Daniel lived in had about 230,000 Jews in it. That was the second biggest population. All Jews ten years and older had to wear the Star of David in the ghettos to show that they belonged there. It was very bad living there. Every person that lived there was starving and or was sick. Daniel was not sick, but his mother and friend were. They lived in an apartment that you can now see in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which is in Washington D.C.
This is a picture of boys in lodz.
How the author portraid lodz
The ghetto lodz was Daniels home for some of Daniels life. The living there was terrible. Almost everyone was starving and sick. The author did a good job explaining the detail of the apartments. She said they were small and little room to live. In the room next to them an old man was frozen.
MLA
Rosenberg, Jennifer. "The Lodz Ghetto: History & overview." N.p., n.d. Web. 9 Jan. 2014.