Blog #5 - If I Should Die Before I Wake

In the book If I Should Die Before I Wake, Chana and her family are forced to move into the Lodz Ghetto. After spending a few weeks in the ghetto, Chana begins to realize her initial feelings about the ghetto were correct, it was horrible. The living conditions were terrible and soon after arriving, food became scarce. “In the ghetto we had no need for a calendar. Our lives were divided into periods based on the distribution of food,” Sara Plagier, also living in a ghetto, wrote in her diary. During the Holocaust, the lack of food didn’t just happen in ghettos, it happened to everyone, whether people were Jewish or not. A boy named Dawid Sierakowiak, wrote, “All I care is that there is soup in my workshop.” During the Holocaust, people did many things to get food that they probably wouldn’t have done otherwise. Chana and her family, including everyone else, knew how important food was, and how they should ration it out. As a gift for his Bar Mitzvah, Chaim Kozienicki, a Jewish boy living during the Holocaust, received half a loaf of bread to eat from his parents. Since Chaim knew how long it probably took for his parents to save it from themselves to give to him, he didn’t want to eat it.

Before moving to the ghetto, Chana’s father was killed by Nazi officers. Chana didn’t have the extra support from her father while living in the ghetto. Even though Chana and her family were able to get along without her father, they didn’t have his added encouragement to be brave. Similar to Chana, Karolina Dresler, a girl living in the time of the Holocaust, also lost her father before moving into hiding with her family. Many Jewish people during the Holocaust were either separated or had family members die in their life.