Everything Will Be Fine

   “Will I ever again sit behind this narrow desk furrowed by a thousand pencil marks? Will I ever again share secrets and moments of hilarity with my classmate? Perhaps schools will reopen soon. Perhaps the country will settle down under German occupation and everything will be just as before. I just know that soon everything will be as before. Lessons will resume and our class will be together again. And we will graduate as planned. i’m quite certain of that.” - Ellie, I Have Lived a Thousand Years, Chapter entitled “Hey, Jew Girl, Jew Girl...”, p. 23 (MARCH 25, 1944).

This shows how slowly the Jews began to lose their freedom to the Nazis, but not just the Jews other people to had to suffer too. Ellie could no longer attend school because her school had been “closed”. She didn't have a choice but she still had hope that she would be able to graduate with her classmates once everything was settled down. Meaning she had hope that everything would be fine and nothing bad would happen. And when everything was resolved it would go back to how it was before. If I would have been in her situation I would have obviously not have had a choice as well but it would've seemed weird to me that they decided to “close” school three months before graduation. This makes me feel terrible, because of what the things children had to go through at a young age. They had to say goodbye to their education, friends but most importantly their freedom.

The theme of this is choiceless choices because Ellie had no other choice than not go to school anymore. A choiceless choice means that you are left with only one option. A lot of people take the opportunity of going to school to learn and spend time with classmates for granted. It doesn't matter to them, but what if one day someone told you, that you couldn't to go to school and learn, spend time with your classmates? Like it was done with Ellie she had no choice but to follow orders. And its astonishing how even though that happened she was sure that it couldn't last long and that everything would be fine. HOPE. Hope had a lot to do during the Holocaust because, hope was the only thing keeping people alive in the ghettos, if you lost hope, and just couldn't stand the harsh living conditions then you'd die.