The Beauty of Nature
Despite the horrors that the Nazis perpetrate on the Jews, Gerda is
quick to point out that there is still beauty in the world, although perhaps
it exists only in nature. When the Germans first invade Bielitz, Gerda is
brought to tears when her neighbor picks Gerda’s mother’s white roses to
give to the Nazis. He drops them, however, and she watches as the soldiers’
boots trample the roses in the dust. She points out the incongruousness of
the Nazis’ depraved behavior when set against the backdrop of the glorious
natural world. Gerda describes the Grünberg labor camp as “cruelty set
against a backdrop of beauty.” Her surprise at seeing a camp lined with
tulips in full bloom yet filled with skeletal girls underscores the horror
of the scene. During the death march, a few girls stop and are unable to go
on. Gerda looks around and admires the beauty of the snowy pine trees while
she hears the gunshots as the girls are executed. She cannot understand how
a world that is so full of beauty can also be inhabited by people who are so
heartless.
Home
Throughout All But My Life,Gerda
lovingly describes her childhood home. The day before she is moved to the
ghetto, Gerda takes a serious risk, saying, “I did not care whether I was
caught or not, I had to see my beloved home once more!” In the camps, Gerda
often thinks of her parents and brother, always set against the backdrop of
her home as it was before they were forced to sell their belongings and move
out. She uses fantasies of returning home and meeting her family to help her
get through the horrors of her days in the camps, and her longing for home
sometimes comes close to overwhelming her while she is on the death march.
The feeling of security she gets from picturing her childhood home does not
diminish until she is liberated. Only then does she slowly start to realize
that her home no longer exists in the way she remembers it. In her epilogue,
however, Gerda recalls her first steps on American soil, with Kurt, her
husband, embracing her and saying, “You have come home.” Only then does
Gerda realize that home is not a physical place but, rather, a set of
feelings that has survived the destruction of the war and will live on
through her new family.
Chance
Rather than portraying her survival as the result of her own cunning
or of divine intervention, Gerda is quick to note the many times that sheer
luck determined whether she would live to see the end of the war. Gerda’s
brushes with death are too numerous to count, and only because of a series
of close calls and coincidences does she avoid being exterminated with the
rest of her family. The police officer who lets her go when she is caught
studying English, her father’s insistence that she wear her ski boots before
she leaves their home, Merin’s forcing her onto the truck to the camps
instead of to Auschwitz, and Ilse’s backing out of their escape plan at the
last minute are all examples of the role that chance plays in her eventual
survival. By accentuating these moments, Gerda makes clear that she does not
believe herself to be superior to those who did not live. Rather, she
portrays the wartime world as a terrifying place where matters of life and
death are again and again determined completely by chance.
Kindness
The Holocaust is one of the most dramatic instances of people behaving
inhumanely and treating others with hideous cruelty, yet Gerda chooses to
focus on the deep friendships she develops during the war and the acts of
generosity she witnesses. Other Holocaust memoirs, such as
Night by Elie Wiesel, detail not only the brutality of the
Nazis but also the cruelty of the Jews toward one another as they are forced
to struggle for their own survival. In contrast, Gerda in almost every case
shows the acts of kindness among her peers in the camps and tries to act as
charitably as they do. Despite the fact that she and her fellow prisoners
are near starvation, Gerda gives her food away many times and, when she is
weak, is given food by Ilse and Hanka. Much like Anne Frank, the author of
the Holocaust memoir Diary of a Young Girl, Gerda is
inspired by the horrors of the war to be more generous and kind rather than
less so.
