Pp. 3-22

Map.
Transylvania.

Timeline. (1944)

1. Europe:

• January 14: Soviet troops start the offensive at Leningrad and Novgorod.
• February 26: Shooting begins on the Nazi propaganda film, "The Fuehrer Gives a Village to the Jews" in Theresienstadt.
• March 19: German forces occupy Hungary.
• June 6: Battle of Normandy: Operation Overlord, code named D-Day, commences with the landing of 155,000 Allied troops on the beaches of Normandy in France.
• August 1: The Warsaw Uprising begins.
• September 3: The Allies liberate Brussels.
• October 21: Aachen,the first German city to fall, is captured by American troops.
• December 31: Hungary declares war on Germany.

2. America

• April 2: El Salvador suffers a strike against its dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez.
• October 20: Guatemala's dictatorship is abolished.
• November 7: Franklin D. Roosevelt wins presidential reelection over Republican challenger.

S.O.S.
The story starts with Elie Wiesel as a thirteen year-old Jewish boy who lives in a small town in Sighet, Transylvania. He’s is the only son from a family formed by his father (who is a shopkeeper), his mother and his three sisters. Elie passed his childhood calmly in Sighet studying the Talmud and always wishing to study the Kabbalah, but his father didn’t allowed him to do so because he said he had to wait until he was older. One day he knew a homeless called Moishe the Beadle, with whom he talked about the Kabbalah and with whom he learnt many things about it.Suddenly, news about a war started to be rumored in Sighet, but nobody really cared about it because they saw it as something really distant. One day, Hungarian police came to Sighet and took away all the homeless, including Moishe, nobody knew where they were taken but they didn’t care. Week later, Moishe arrived injured to the town telling everybody that the other homeless were killed by the Hungarian and that soon they will always be killed and nobody paid attention to him. A year passed calmly in Sighet just with news about the new World War but with no incidents in it until one day German soldiers arrived to the town. At first, German soldiers didn’t do anything, actually they were nice, but later things changed drastically. First, they closed the synagogues, forbid religious ceremonies, arrested rebels and made Jews used a yellow star. Then, they created two ghettos and obliged all Jews to live in there and didn’t allow them to exit. Then, they were threatened to be killed if they didn’t follow new imposed rules. Finally, all Jews were made to leave all their belongings in the ghetto and they started to be transported to concentration camps (although they didn’t know where they were taken). To accomplish this process they were first moved to the small ghetto where they were checked and they were separated in men and women and then, they were transported to the concentration camp in trains. Elie’s family was the last group of Jews to be taken away, so they saw all the people they knew going away, he and his family lived with anguish during those waiting days.I think that this was a very cruel human action because they judged people just for their religion and they didn’t care killing millions of innocent people, destroying families, and humiliating and hurting people. The saddest thing is that children were also injured and killed and that no mercy was shown. I think that this has been the greatest discrimination act that the world has had. All of these events were just done by the countries to get power.