A Naïve Boy’s View of the Holocaust
Author’s Note: This writing piece is
about the novel Milkweed by Jerry Spinelli. The purpose is to show how the point of view
of the novel influences the reader to feel angry about the way many people were
treated in Warsaw, Poland during WWII.
In
Milkweed, a young boy without an identity is struggling to survive in
Nazi-dominated Poland during WWII. The
story is written in Misha, the young
orphan's, point of view. From
this perspective, a lot of events and characters are described in a way that
creates rage and disgust in the
reader about Nazis, the ghettos in
Poland during the war, and the way people were allowed to be treated in general
back then.
One
way that Misha's point of view
influences the reader's interpretation is how this perspective describes/shows the citizens of Poland allowing, and
accepting, certain types of inhumane treatment to go on in Warsaw toward the
Jews and Gypsies. It was
especially painful to see the way that the crowd let the governing police strip
and beat a man for no reason. Another terrifying scene was when the young
soldier "Jackboot" and his girlfriend were treating the
orphan/homeless boys like they were circus animals. That part, seen from
Misha's eyes, seemed confusing at first, but, once the reader caught on to what
was really happening, it was really disheartening to think that people actually
treated others like that simply because of their religion.
However,
the reader would feel a lot differently about Milkweed if the novel was written
in the point of view of one of the
Jackboots. For instance, the
reader wouldn't have thought that it
was wrong to be degrading the Jews and Gypsies of Warsaw, because they had been
so brainwashed by the government and their friends/influences around them that
these people were beneath them. Even
though this seems so unbelievably wrong to us, if the Jackboot told the story,
they probably would have made it sound more sympathetic to the government; it
may even have sounded convincing, as if the Jews and Gypsies in the story even
deserved what they were getting!
As
you can see, the point of view of a story forces the reader to see just one
side of an event or topic. In Milkweed, the narrator's perspective makes the
reader sympathize with the Jews and
Gypsies, particularly the children who were helpless victims during WWII in
Poland. This novel is particularly
powerful because it was written from a young boy who didn't even know if he was
Jewish (abandoned at birth), so it really showed how unclear and wrong the
reasons for the mistreatment of the Jewish and Gypsy people were. I think that, if it was written in any other
point of view, the reader wouldn't have gotten such a strong, emotional
understanding of how the unfortunate were treated during WWII in Europe.
