Fred Character Analysis

“Where are you from?” Fred asked me while we worked.

I hesitated, remembering Uncle Moshe’s warnings. But Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.

I should let him go, I thought over and over. Let him make his own way. I should save myself. That was how you survived the camps: You saved yourself. No one else was going to do it for you.

But this boy had a face. He had a name too, though I didn’t know it. He had a mother and father, probably dead now, but he had family. A home somewhere. He could have been me.

Farther inside Czechoslovakia, some of the villagers hung out of their windows to throw whatever they had to us—crusts of bread, half-eaten apples, raw potatoes. The Czechs couldn’t share much—there was a war on, after all, and food was hard to come by. But their kindness in the face of the Nazi soldiers and their guns warmed my heart. It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

I remembered the food on the table in my old apartment in Podgórze, and all my family sitting around me. Mother and Father. Uncle Moshe and Aunt Gizela, and little cousin Zytka. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela. […]

I thought too of my friend Fred, and the boy who had been hanged for trying to escape, and the man who had fought back, and all the other people I had watched die. They filled my table and the tables all around me, taking the places of all the real people in the room.

“Where are you from?” Fred asked me while we worked.

I hesitated, remembering Uncle Moshe’s warnings. But Fred was the first person close to my age I’d met since hiding under the floors at Plaszów with Isaac and Thomas. I loved just talking again. Being human.

I should let him go, I thought over and over. Let him make his own way. I should save myself. That was how you survived the camps: You saved yourself. No one else was going to do it for you.

But this boy had a face. He had a name too, though I didn’t know it. He had a mother and father, probably dead now, but he had family. A home somewhere. He could have been me.

Farther inside Czechoslovakia, some of the villagers hung out of their windows to throw whatever they had to us—crusts of bread, half-eaten apples, raw potatoes. The Czechs couldn’t share much—there was a war on, after all, and food was hard to come by. But their kindness in the face of the Nazi soldiers and their guns warmed my heart. It was easy to think the worst of humanity when all I saw was brutality and selfishness, and these people showed me there was still good in the world, even if I rarely saw it.

I remembered the food on the table in my old apartment in Podgórze, and all my family sitting around me. Mother and Father. Uncle Moshe and Aunt Gizela, and little cousin Zytka. Uncle Abraham and Aunt Fela. […]

I thought too of my friend Fred, and the boy who had been hanged for trying to escape, and the man who had fought back, and all the other people I had watched die. They filled my table and the tables all around me, taking the places of all the real people in the room.