Obstacles of a Holocaust Surviver

          Hostage To War by Tatjana Wassiljewa is a memoir. The story is about Tatjana, a girl who was sent as a captive laborer in 1942 during World War II. The memoir goes over her childhood, where she strived for food, her captivity and how her life was like in the camps, and her freedom at the end and what she did when she was out of the camps.

            I think that the external conflict that Tatjana went through before the war was fighting for her life. Her family had very little food and Tatjana's mother had to put in her all to find food for her kids and husband. An example of having very little food is when Tatjana said, "We had had nothing to eat for many days. Not even the smallest crumb." Tatjana's way of over coming this was walking 100 kilometers which is about 62 miles to the corn regions to support her family during a really bad snow storm. This really shows how she put her family before anything. Tatjana could've easily died from starvation and hypothermia but she did all that she could as a young 13 year old girl to help her family. Hard work pays off though because at the end of her journey, she was able to feed her family.

Looking '4-ward' to 4th quarter.

I think that the most exciting thing that I look forward to is the end of the year trips, dinner dance, and most of all graduating. I feel like the school year flew by and in a month I'll be graduating!

Compare and Contrast

                                         

I'm comparing my book Perect by Natasha Friend to this poem.
They're similar because perfection IS Isabelle's enemy. That's what she was always striving for.
To be perfect like everyone else.
It messed with her until she got to the point of suffering from bulimia.

"Have you heard of something called the halo effect?... It means that people who are good-looking, people who are beautiful like your friend Penelope, are often perceived as being perfect simply because they are beautiful. We're so blinded by the prettiness, we don't see the imperfections. We don't see them as real people, with real flaws. In fact, we see them as smarter, nicer...cooler than the average person." 

That quote from the book Is showing how she slowly became her enemy and how. She always just thought that it's all about being perfect and smart and no flaws but it got to the best of her

I think one main difference from this poem and the book is the way they became to think this way. I think that the person in the poem just thought negatively about herself and wasnt happy but with Isabelle, her father had passed away and she began to eat so much and just couldn't stop so it caused her to feel terrible at the end and would throw it all up.

Answers to Famous Last Words

          Famous Last Words by Katie Alender is about a girl named Willa. Her father passed away and she struggled to move on from it but her mom clearly moved on and got re-married to a Hollywood film director, Johnathan. Willa and her mom move to Hollywood, where a serial killer is on the loose, with Jonathan to have a new start but Willa is too caught up in the past and constantly tries to contact her father's spirit but instead ends up contacting someone who was murdured by the serial killer in that house. The serial killers way of killing people was to reenact old movie death scenes.

          In my last blog, I wrote about what confused me in the book and now that I've finished it, I understand. I had said that "she always tries to contact her dad's spirit but all she gets is things like strange messages on her mirror, reflections that aren't hers, and dead bodies in her swimming pool. How come she can't see her dad?" I found out that it was because she always contacted a person who was a victim of Serial killer in that house and  she was trying to help Willa find who it was. I also asked if her trying to contact her dad connected to the serial killer and it did in a way but it also didn't.

Questions to Famous Last Words by Katie Alender

          Famous Last Words by Katie Alender is about a girl named Willa. Her father passed away and she struggled to move on from it but her mom clearly moved on and got re-married to a Hollywood film director, Johnathan. Willa and her mom move to Hollywood with Jonathan to have a new start but Willa is too caught up in the past and constantly tries to contact his sprite which causes end to see things such as dead bodies in a pool. Another thing is that a serial killer is on the loose in Hollywood and his way of murdering them is to reenact murder scenes from old movies.

          Something that is confusing to me in this book is that she always tries to contact her dad's spirit but all she gets is things like strange messages on her mirror, reflections that aren't hers, and dead bodies in her swimming pool. How come she can't see her dad? But I also wanna know how this connects to the serial killer or if it even does connect to the serial killer.

You don't have to be perfect to fit in...

          Perfect by Natasha Friend is about a girl named Isabelle Lee who is 13 and suffers from an eating disorder. She was caught trying to make herself throw up by her little sister "Ape Face" and had to join an eating disorder and body image therapy group. An A-Ha moment that my character had was when she realized that nobody is perfect. She states in the book, "in she walked: Ashley Barnum. The Ashley Barnum...First of all, the name Ashley Barnum. Royalty, right?.. She has blue eyes, surfer girl hair, and perfect thighs... Captain of the field hockey team...voted most popular girl." She was confused on why Ashley was even in a therapy group but she later became friends with her and Isabelle realized that even the most perfect girl had her flaws.

          I feel like teens can relate to this book because they are beginning to compare themselves with these people that are what they consider perfect and they begin to start an unhealthy habit of trying to be like them but it's really only hurting themselves. Teens need to know that even those perfect people aren't so perfect and this book can teach them that.

Genocide

How and why do genocides happen? What can we do about it?

Genocides happen when a race, ethnicity, religion or basically anything that makes you who you are isn't socially accepted where you are and people want to do something to completely get rid of you. All of the groups we worked on such as Sudan and Rwanda, they people from there weren't wanted. They started going on mass killing to completely erase them out. Nobody has any tolerance for anything and that's what we need to learn. You may not like a certain race, sexuality, religion ect., but you have to learn to deal with it because it does start conflict.