if i shoulddie b4 i wake Essay example -- essays research papers

In the book â€Å"If I Die Before I Wake† by Han Nolan a girl named Hilary Burke has been severely injured in a motorcycle accident while riding with her boyfriend, Brad, the leader of a local neo-Nazi gang. The closest hospital is a Jewish hospital and Hilary is taken there, Nazi armband and everything. In a strange twist of fate, Hilary is transported back through flashbacks to the German occupation of Poland where she becomes a girl named Chana. Chana is a young girl who, along with her Polish family, is faced with the horrors of being a Jew in wartime Poland .Hilary sees World War II in the perspective of Chana. The story flips back and forth between Chana and Hilary with one major plot in each girl’s life. Before her accident, Hilary helped out with her friends to kidnap her Jewish neighbor, Simon, and they stuffed him in a gym locker at school. There is a large search underway to find him. While Hilary thinks treating the Jews differently is funny, she has to live in the eyes of a Jewish person while she flashes back into Chana’s time. In Chana’s story she goes through the full horror of being Jewish under Nazi rule which includes the complete breaking down of her family, the horrors of the Lodz ghetto, and ultimately the suffering of Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Hilary and her mother don’t have the best bond. Yet Hilary’s mother does all she can to help nurse her back to stable heath, and she sits by her side the whole time while she is at the Jewish hospital. Even when there was...