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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
Twelve-year-old Josef Landau wakes up with a start as Nazi soldiers break into his family’s home. He is dragged from his bed and becomes so scared that he wets himself. The soldiers grab Josef’s six-year-old sister Ruthie by the hair as she screams. They then destroy everything in the room as Josef and Ruthie cling to each other.
From the outset, Gratz places readers in the middle of the action and immediately demonstrates the cruelty of the Nazis against the Jews. Josef and his sister Ruthie are just children, and yet they are needlessly abused by the soldiers.
Themes
The soldiers then drag Josef and Ruthie into the living room, where the children’s mother, Rachel, and father, Aaron, are. They accuse Josef’s father of practicing law, despite the fact that Jews are forbidden to do so under German law. For this “crime against the German people,” he will be taken into custody.
The Nazis labelling Aaron’s practice as a “crime against the German people” inherently detaches them from their own German culture. Josef understands himself to be German, and yet the Nazis are trying to take away this aspect of German Jewish people’s identity.
Themes
Josef tries to fight the soldiers. The Nazis laugh at the wet spot on Josef’s pajamas, mocking him for being a little boy. Josef insists he’ll be a man soon, and the soldiers turn on him, saying that if he’s a man, he could go to the camps as well. Rachel cries in protest. The Nazis drag Aaron away, warning Josef not to be “so quick to grow up.” The Nazis then destroy the rest of the furniture and objects in the house.
Josef demonstrates his personal desire to grow up, but over the course of the novel he comes to recognize the value of being able to be a child. His experiences with oppression in Germany, and then as a refugee, cause him to grow up far sooner than he should have to.
Themes
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The next day, Josef discovers that the Nazis raided and destroyed thousands of Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues all over Germany. They called it Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass.” Josef and the others know it means that they aren’t wanted in Germany. Rachel, meanwhile, tries fruitlessly to find Aaron. They do not hear about him until six months later. They receive a telegram saying that Aaron would be released from a concentration camp called Dachau, on the condition that he leave the country within two weeks.
Gratz shows how Josef’s experience is not an isolated incident: all over Germany, Jews are facing the same kind of erasure of their culture and identity. Yet instead of succumbing to the despair of these events, Josef and the rest of his family resolve to try to find a better life in a new country.
Themes
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