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The Devilś Arithmetic & George Washington´s Socks.

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The Devilś Arithmetic & George Washington´s Socks.

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Character Traits:
Both characters are clever and cautious
Matt is both Clever and Cautious because he is carefully being a spy, and can make up any lie on the spot.
Chaya ( Hannah) is both Clever and Cautious because she is careful about what she says or does around the camps, and she knows how to get away with stuff very easily.

Themes:
Both characters use Friendship to be able to live
You can find Friendship in unexpected places

Conflicts- Character response
Matt responds to conflict by freezing up and stuttering
Chaya ( Hannah) responds to conflict by thinking about the camp rules and thinking about good moments with her family.

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One word that describes the setting is ¨ Suspensful.¨

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Character is being affected by the setting Before and After: 

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Character is being affected by the setting Before and After: 

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1. This one part of the book describes how Hannah ( Chaya) was BEFORE the conflict. Hannah ( Chaya) is Hostipable. ¨ Erb,¨ she corrected with a whisper, ¨ Dont pronounce the H.¨  On page 14. Which shows that the character is always there to help.

2. During the conflict the book describes the character  as ¨Stunned.¨ ¨Hannah was Stunned.¨ On page 23. Which shows that when Hannah was transported back into the past, she was Baffled.

3. ¨ Paralyzed by their own Stiffness.¨ On pages 28. Which proves that the setting is showing that the setting is impactful on Hannah. After the conflict, of course.

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1. Hannah ( Chaya).
Character's perspective on the historical conflict, the protagonist feels Scared because she has been transported into the past. And now has to live through the gruesome horrors of the Holocaust. ¨ You can´t believe that!¨ On page 68.

2. Gitl.
Character's perspective on the historical conflict, the Minor character feels Nervous but also pretty Okay because she didn't think many bad things on the Nazis. " Hannah! How can you talk like that?¨ On pages 66-67.

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Konstanty Rokicki

Konstanty Rokicki, a Polish diplomat and intelligence operative who died in penniless obscurity, turns out to have been one of the forgotten heroes of the Holocaust. He tried to save the lives of thousands of Jews. A knack for forging passports. And one of the bravest chapters in the wartime rescue of Jews from the grips of the Holocaust.

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Konstanty Rokicki, a Polish diplomat and intelligence operative who died in penniless obscurity, turns out to have been one of the forgotten heroes of the Holocaust. He tried to save lives of thousands of Jews with his knack for forging Paraguayan passports.

Three quarters of a century after Rokicki applied his formidable skills to tricking the Nazis, 60 years after his death from lung cancer, my diplomats, members of my team at the Polish Embassy in Switzerland were astonished to recognize the neat identical loops of his handwriting on one fabricated passport after another. The travel documents had been discovered in 2017 by Polish and Canadian journalists who asked us to confirm one of the bravest chapters in the wartime rescue of Jews from the grips of the Holocaust.

Rokicki had been vice-consul of Poland's Legation (Embassy) in Berne, Switzerland, during World War II working with Ambassador Aleksander Ładoś and his deputy, Counselor Stefan Ryniewicz. He died in 1958 and was buried in a Swiss paupers cemetery. Now he's being recognized by the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem with the title, "Righteous Among the Nations.''

Allow me to share some additional facts we have learned so far:
1. The rescue operation in Berne was much larger than we had ever thought.
All of the Paraguayan passports that were issued in Berne between 1941 and 1943 were numbered consecutively in five separate number series. Based upon the highest serial numbers found in each series, we estimate that at least 1,056 passports were issued for 2,500 people. In addition documents confirming the Paraguayan citizenship were forged for 2,000 other Jews. Additionally Ładoś, Rokicki and Ryniewicz gave the Jewish organizations green light to obtain documents of Honduras, Haiti and Peru and defended their Jewish partners when the Swiss police tried to intervene. Our assessment is that between 8,000 and 10,000 Jews from Poland, Holland, Germany, Austria and a dozen of other countries, were given an chance to avoid deportation thanks to Rokicki and his colleagues. It increased the chances for their survival.
2. Rokicki did not act alone, he was a member of a team
Rokicki was known as one of the top aces of Polish Military Intelligence ("Dwójka") working in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. In Berne, he served under Ambassador Ładoś and Ryniewicz, the latter being also his personal friend. Rokicki was also supported by his Jewish colleague Juliusz Kühl, who worked at the Legation. All of them knew about the passports and both of them supported and participated in this operation. We have located proof that in many cases Rokicki acted upon direct instructions and orders from his superiors. One of many examples: a request to "organize" a passport for the family of Herbert Kruskal, his wife and three children, was sent to Ambassador Ładoś. A passport was then created in Rokicki's handwriting, clearly after Ładoś ordered it. The entire family survived.

When the plot was discovered Ambassador Ładoś personally intervened with the Swiss Foreign Ministry threatening Switzerland with international scandal and Ryniewicz went to calm down the Swiss Fremdenpolizei's chief, Heinrich Rothmund. "It's about human life", both argued. The Swiss abstained from taking further actions.
3. Rokicki followed the Polish government's instructions but went further.
Most European diplomats who have been declared Righteous Among The Nations acted alone and in constant fear of their own superiors. But this is a completely different case. Ładoś and his diplomats, who broke Swiss law, were supported by their superiors.

When, in April 1943, the Polish government-in-Exile learned what was going on in Berne, it immediately applauded the illegal forgery operation as it was motivated by "purely humanitarian reasons." The government then requested that such passports be issued to dozens if not hundreds of individual Jewish activists and religious leaders. The government also partially covered the costs of the operation and secured the recognition of the passports by Paraguay and other states.
4. Rokicki did not know the people he rescued.
There is no proof that Rokicki knew any of the people for whom he issued the passports. As with many massive Holocaust rescuers, he operated a system and worked upon lists and data provided to him by two reliable Jewish partners - Abraham Silberschein from the World Jewish Congress, and Chaim Eiss, the representative of Agudath Yisrael.

None of the people who were rescued knew about Rokicki. Most of them understood that the passports were given to them by their relatives in Switzerland. Only in 2017 did some of the remaining survivors start to discover that all of the passports looked alike. Some of the people who were rescued did not even know that passports were issued for them. Some of the documents were seized by the Nazis and used in their ransom schemes. Nevertheless, the issuance of these passports prevented thousands of people from being sent to the death camps.
5. Rokicki died in poverty and obscurity.
Rokicki and Kühl acted as intermediaries at paying bribes to the Swiss lawyer who represented Paraguay. Although Rokicki is believed to have paid around half a million francs in bribes to the "Paraguayan" honorary consul, and that the money came from Jewish and in some cases Polish, Swiss and Dutch donors, he himself did not profit in the operation. After he left his consular post in 1946 and refused to serve the post-war Polish Communist government, the Swiss police believed that he was too poor to allow him to remain in Switzerland. Later on various reports showed him as a person in need. In the late 50s, Rokicki lived in paupers' home.

You have not heard about Rokicki before. That's right as he left no memoirs.

Rokicki died of cancer on July 18, 1958 and was buried in a section for poor people at the cemetery in Luzern. His last trace is a piece correspondence dated July 1957 when he lived in the paupers' home. Rokicki asked for 15 francs as a reimbursement for his meals.

His burial place was discovered only 60 years later.

Jakub Kumoch is the Polish Ambassador to Switzerland

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The Polish Holocaust hero you've never heard of

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Konstanty Rokicki, a Polish diplomat and intelligence operative who died in penniless obscurity, turns out to have been one of the forgotten heroes of the Holocaust. He tried to save lives of thousands of Jews with his knack for forging Paraguayan passports.

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Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki was a Polish cavalry officer, intelligence agent, and resistance leader. He served as a cavalry officer in the Polish Army, and was known for WILLINGLY become a Nazi Prisoner in order to report all of the gruesome horrors of the concentration camps. The greatest hero or the biggest fool that was how one prisoner in Auschwitz , he would give up his life in order to let everyone know what layes beyond the barbed wire.

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"The greatest hero or the biggest fool" - that was how one prisoner in Auschwitz described Witold Pilecki, when the latter entered its gates in September 1940. There was a good reason for such a comment: Pilecki was the only person who ostensibly entered the death camp by choice, and also among the relative few who eventually succeeded to escape it. The tumultuous saga of Pilecki, who was not recognized during his lifetime as a hero despite the fact that he reported to the world about the horrors he witnessed, ended with his execution by communist authorities in 1948 after being convicted of treason in a show trial.

Seventy-two years later, Pilecki is a legend, now recognized in Poland, his homeland, as one of the greatest heroes in its contemporary history. Streets are named after him, memorials to him can be found throughout the country, books and films present his story, and politicians - mainly those affiliated with the nationalist right-wing government - often invoke his name to sell their preferred Holocaust narrative to the world. This is a historical narrative that typically glorifies the Poles who fought the Germans while minimizing the role other Poles played in crimes committed by the Germans.

A new book, "The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz," which recently won the prestigious British Costa Book of the Year award, now makes this human drama more accessible to English-language readers. The author, Jack Fairweather, a 42-year-old Welsh-born journalist, who divides his time between England and the United States, covered wars in recent decades in Iraq and Afghanistan for The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post and others. In 2005 he survived a suicide attack against U.S. soldiers in Mosul, with whom he was traveling.

Fairweather came across the story of Pilecki by chance, in 2011, during a conversation with a fellow journalist who had just returned from a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, where he heard for the first time about the underground resistance that operated in the camp. Fairweather was amazed to hear of the underground and realized immediately that Pilecki's story contained all the elements of a blockbuster book, or maybe Oscar-winning Hollywood drama, about life in Auschwitz, which was ultimately liberated by the Allies 75 years ago.

Fairweather harnessed his journalistic talents and curiosity to a different type of investigatory effort, which took about four years. This time he didn't endanger his own life, but did do an impressive job of documenting the dangers posed to his protagonist's. "The Volunteer" is full of references and information from a host of historical sources, and is based on comprehensive research conducted in archives, including that of the Auschwitz museum itself, as well as perusal of documents kept by Pilecki's family and interviews with relatives who knew him.

Not black and white

For their part, historians who research the Holocaust and World War II are quite familiar with Pilecki's story, which has been documented before. Readers of newspapers and various websites have probably seen some of the many articles written about him in recent times. In 2012 the full report that Pilecki himself wrote about Auschwitz in 1945 was translated into English, and entitled "The Volunteer from Auschwitz."
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But outside of academia and of Poland, Pilecki is not a household name. In Israel in particular few people have heard of him, and thus for the Israeli reader Fairweather's book offers a first opportunity to learn about this fascinating story.

Witold Pilecki's story begins in September 1939 with the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the establishment two months later - by Pilecki and others - of a Polish underground resistance movement, which operated in coordination with the government-in-exile that had been established in Paris and later moved to London.

In September 1940, Pilecki, then 39 years old and married with two children, was sent on a suicide mission: to infiltrate Auschwitz, which had been built by the Nazis three months earlier outside the Polish city of Oswiecim, as a concentration camp for Polish prisoners. Pilecki, a Catholic, was a decorated officer in the Polish army during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-21, and also among those involved in futile attacks against the German tanks during the invasion of Poland. Now, as a member of an underground group - which was subsumed two years later within the dominant Home Army Polish resistance organization - he was ordered to create an underground network in Auschwitz. His goal: to gather intelligence and report about the mass murders in the camp, to help comrades and others detained there, and to organize a possible attack against their Nazi captors.

Is it correct to consider Pilecki a "volunteer," as the name of the Fairweather's book suggests - and which is also in keeping with the way he has been described by politicians and media outlets in Poland and elsewhere in the world? Perhaps, but we must be very careful not to fall into the very tempting trap of cutting corners and ignoring complex, complicated or controversial parts that transform a story from history into literature.

As every novice historian knows, reality in most cases is not black or white, absolute good versus absolute evil. Even heroes have their weaknesses, even national symbols and legends have other sides, which proper historical research is supposed to reveal and grapple with - not downplay or avoid in order to serve a narrative that will help to sell more books. On the other hand, perhaps that is what's necessary to "sell" Pilecki to the average American or Israeli reader, who may be put off from reading another book about the Holocaust or is looking for stories of unimaginable heroism.

Pilecki did not volunteer of his own free will and enter Auschwitz blindly. To do such a thing he would have had to be nonhuman. In spite of the name of Fairweather's book, a perusal of it reveals that the hero actually hesitated before accepting the mission in Auschwitz, and that there were differences of opinion about sending him there - arguments and ideological clashes within the Polish resistance. These are downplayed in the book, so as not to confuse the reader with an overly complex and tortuous plot, and perhaps also to make the entire story more heroic.

Anyone who wants to learn the full story must also become more familiar with Jan Wlodarkiewicz, Pilecki's commander in the underground group created in 1939, who had nationalist and even anti-Semitic leanings. In addition, we must make an acquaintance with one of Pilecki's deputies in the movement, Dr. Wladyslaw Dering, a Polish doctor who helped the Nazi doctors in Auschwitz. During the trial of that war criminal in communist Poland, after World War II, a Jewish Holocaust survivor living in Israel testified against Dering, claiming that he "was involved in killing his victims by injecting poison, sending them to the gas chambers and conducting experiments on living people."

Pilecki himself was neither anti-Semitic nor a nationalist. But the fact of there being such people in his immediate surroundings is worthy of a more detailed, complex discussion - even at the price of a decline in book sales.

'Six weeks to live'

When the underground received information about a German invasion of a specific area in Warsaw, Pilecki was sent there in order to be arrested on purpose. During his research on the book, author Fairweather met Pilecki's nephew, who was 3 years old at the time of the invasion. Together they visited the apartment where Pilecki had lived at the time of his arrest, during a Nazi roundup of citizens on September 19, 1940. From a distance of so many decades, the nephew still remembered the stomping of the Germans' boots in the stairwell and his uncle, who gave him a teddy bear before being arrested.

The plan was successful: Pilecki was put on a train and deported to Auschwitz, where he became prisoner No. 4859. He spent two and a half years there.

Another famous Polish prisoner was deported to the death camp then as well - Wladyslaw Bartoszewski who, after his release from Auschwitz the following April due to efforts by the Polish Red Cross, saved the lives of many Jews who fled the Warsaw Ghetto, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial website. Bartoszewski, who was granted the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, also served as the Polish foreign minister.

Upon entering the death camp as a prisoner, Pilecki was shocked by the brutality, hunger, disease and death he saw there. "None of you should imagine that he will ever succeed in leaving this place alive," said the SS man who received the new inmates. "According to the calculations, you have six weeks to live," he added.

Another guard threatened the prisoners that their only way out was by way of the ovens: Indeed, although systematic mass murder by gassing had yet to be instituted when Pilecki arrived, the crematoria were already operating.

During his long stay there, Pilecki witnessed many changes in the camp. For example, in September 1941 Zyklon B gas was used for the first time; its initial victims were Soviet and Polish prisoners. In early 1942 the mass murder of the Jews in began in the gas chambers, and later the adjacent Birkenau camp began to operate, too.

According to Fairweather's account, Pilecki recruited new friends to the resistance movement from among the camp's prisoners and, under impossible conditions, helped fellow comrades and other inmates survive by providing them with food and medicine, and set up an underground intelligence network that managed to smuggle information to the outside world. The first time he did so was in October 1940, shortly after his deportation: A Polish prisoner who was released from the camp memorized a message given to him by Pilecki, and conveyed it verbally to the underground in Warsaw.

Along with a report about the despair and horror he and others suffered at Auschwitz, Pilecki called on the Allies - at a very early stage, even before the systematic murder of European Jewry had begun - to bomb Auschwitz, even at the risk of killing inmates there, including himself. During his in-depth research for "The Volunteer," Fairweather found evidence of this demand.

Pilecki continued to smuggle out reports about what was happening in the camp: Some were sent via Polish farmers who were working nearby; others by prisoners who managed to escape. Every message was more terrible than its predecessor: The Nazis are conducting medical experiments on prisoners; the Nazis are murdering thousands of Polish POWs; the Nazis are conducting experiments with gas to be used in mass murder operations; the camp is expanding; trains filled with Jews are arriving and their passengers are immediately dispatched to their deaths; hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are being murdered.

In April 1943, when Pilecki realized that no help was coming from the outside, he again did something virtually inconceivable: He succeeded in escaping. While working a night shift at a bakery outside the gates of the camp, he and two friends managed to overpower a guard, disconnect the phone lines and escape under cover of darkness.

Despite the obvious drama surrounding any individual who succeeds in escaping from "another planet," it's important to note that Pilecki was not the first nor the only one to escape from Auschwitz. Of among the approximately one million prisoners there, some 900 tried to escape throughout the years, most of them Poles, Russians and Jews. Most were shot to death while fleeing or were murdered immediately afterward by the Nazis. About 200 of them succeeded in escaping, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum website.

Battle of narratives

The plan to attack Auschwitz, which Pilecki proposed to the underground forces, was never approved. He continued with his resistance activities and fought in the Polish Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1944, about a year after the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto revolt. He subsequently fell into German hands as a POW but eventually returned to fight on behalf of the resistance. At the end of World War II he actively opposed the communist occupation of his homeland, which led to his arrest in 1947.

Condemned to death for treason, on May 25, 1948 (10 days after the establishment of the State of Israel) Pilecki was executed in a Polish prison. Only in 1990, after the fall of the communist regime and the advent of Polish independence was his name was cleared and he became a national hero.

In January, during the events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin placed a wreath at the foot of a monument commemorating Pilecki in Poland, and shook the hand of his daughter Zofia. It was a very tense visit, in light of the battle of World War II narratives now being waged between Israel, Poland and Russia - i.e., surrounding the identity of the war heroes and the war criminals, of who started and who ended the war, and of who collaborated with the Nazis and who opposed them.

On the backdrop of these fraught historical and political debates, Pilecki stands out. Not as a superman, but as a courageous Polish patriot, who tried - unsuccessfully (it's doubtful whether he could ever have succeeded under those circumstances), to warn the world of the horrors of Auschwitz before it turned into the largest factory of death in the history of mankind.

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Patriot but not superman: Reporter Witold Pilecki, Auschwitz prisoner No. 4859

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"The greatest hero or the biggest fool" - that was how one prisoner in Auschwitz described Witold Pilecki, when the latter entered its gates in September 1940. There was a good reason for such a comment: Pilecki was the only person who ostensibly entered the death camp by choice, and also among the relative few who eventually succeeded to escape it.

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What were the main conflicts in The Holocaust?

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What were the main conflicts in The Holocaust?

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The main conflicts were that Hitler wanted to take over the Jewish countries while he was fighting against other countries, and wanted to take out a whole GENERATION OF PEOPLE. And wanted to also murder them in concentration camps in order to get rid of them for good. ( Concentration Camps is a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.)

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What is an important personal narrative in The Holocaust?

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What is an important personal narrative in The Holocaust?

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An important narrative in the holocaust was Eva Heyman. The reason why Eva Heyman was important was that she was a teenager in the Concentration Camps. And wrote in her Diary/Journal about the gruesome horrors of Auschwitz.

Another important narrative that had a diferent side than Eva Heyman was Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was important because he was the evil human being who had killed over 6 million jews, and had wanted the whole entire generation of jews to be destroyed.

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What were the different groups of people involved?

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What were the different groups of people involved?

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The different groups that were involved were,
- Jewish
- Germans
- Polish
- Dutch

This is a map that shows the different places where the groups lived, and where the concentration camps mostly had been/ had happened at.

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This map is showing every place where the concentration camps were set at, which is showing mostly Germany and Poland.

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Germany fought against poland because of the jews that were in poland the german had killed all the jews that were in poland.

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-Neville Chamberlain

-Winston Churchill

-Joseph Stalin

-Adolf Hitler

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The Jewish population in Europe stood at over nine million. Most European Jews lived in countries that Nazi Germany would occupy or influence during world war ll. By the end of the war in 1945, the Germans and their allies and killed nearly two out of every three European Jews as part of the Final Solution.

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The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.