Analysis of Techniques and Themes in Holocaust Literature and Testimony

Consider man mud peace bread yes or no.

"Consider if this is a man / Who works in the mud / Who does not know peace / Who fights for a scrap of bread / Who dies because of a yes or a no." —

Techniques: Direct address; anaphora ("Who... Who..."); imperative.

Our language demolition man.

"Our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man." —

Techniques: Metalinguistic commentary; architectural metaphor ("demolition").

If we not understand.

"If we speak, they will not listen... and if they listen, they will not understand." —

Techniques: Parallelism; antithesis.

Precisely because become beasts.

"Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts." —

Techniques: Antithesis; machine metaphor; moral imperative.

Thanks to was a man.

"Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man." —

Techniques: Understatement; synecdoche (Lorenzo = one good man).

We still refuse consent.

"We still possess one power... the power to refuse our consent." —

Techniques: Collective "we"; declarative structure;

Grief and law...greater.

"Grief and pain... hide, the lesser behind the greater." — Techniques: Philosophical reflection; visual metaphor ("law of perspective").

To destroy have succeeded.

"To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one... but you Germans have succeeded." —

Techniques: Direct address; bitter irony; antithesis (destroy/create).

Why does dark truths?

"Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths?" —

Techniques: Rhetorical question; retrospective narration.

Sometimes the ended unhappily.

"Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily." —

Techniques: Paradox; aphoristic phrasing.

The memory…out station.

"The memory of her stopped accompanying me... the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station." — Techniques: Extended simile (city/train); metaphor of departure.

That was read write.

"She had let me do all the writing and reading... Hanna could neither read nor write." —

Techniques: Anaphora; revelation/climax.

I took never had.

"I took all the blame. I admitted mistakes I hadn't made, intentions I'd never had." —

Techniques: Short declaratives; parallelism; confessional first-person.

What is...in a society?

"What is law? Is it what is on the books, or what is actually enacted and obeyed in a society?" —

Techniques: Rhetorical questions; abstract nouns; legal-philosophical register.

I wanted...for that

"I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna's crime and to condemn it. But it was too terrible for that." —

Techniques: Antithesis (understand/condemn); concessive "But" cutting the sentence short; confessional mode.

The tectonic later ones.

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones." —

Techniques: Narratorial/philosophical reflection, epiphany