I Want to Be One of Them

"'I want to be one of them. And you can only be one of them if you're half-starved or if you've had typhus. Being gassed a bit helps, too. Anyway, you have to have suffered damage in some way.'"(115)

The quotation above is said by Max. Max feels as though he is not good enough for his father. He feels neglected. Ephraim only gives him support through stories of the camp. Thus, Max almost always is the one who starts an event in which the children tried to recreate scenes from the camp. This is another such instance. Max has put his feet in the refrigerator because he wants to see what they will look like when they freeze. It is under these circumstances that he says the above. Max feels as though the person he wants to impress (his father) does not love him because Max has not gone through the camp, so he says he "[wants] to be one of them." Though he still wants to have camp, he separates himself from the survivors, saying "them." He is sadly aware of the fact that he does not have camp. He then says that "you can only be one of them if you're half-starved or if you've had typhus," as though he suddenly has become an expert on the specific requirements of having camp, of being respected. There is a sense of childish pride in his tone because he wants to impress his brothers. He takes this pride a step further by saying, "Being gassed a bit helps, too," as though he would be alive after having been gassed. Though he pretends to be an expert of suffering, he fails to understand that one does not survive a gassing, even if it is only "a bit." He tries to act mature, but he is sticking his foot in a refrigerator. "'You're crazy'"(115), replies Simon, but Max responds with a statement that sums up his feelings, "'Everybody's crazy in this house!'"(116). Max feels as though everyone he sees has gone mad because of their immense suffering, and he wants to fit in.

Love Thy Enemy

When reading Nightfather, I was stunned when Friedman says, "Perhaps he [the father] misses his enemies most of all"(37). Friedman, throughout our entire reading so far, talks about how her father is constantly haunted, and even consumed by his memories of the camp. He sleepwalks "without ever finding peace"(6) and constantly tells his children gruesome stories, despite the fact that they are simply too young to understand them. The narrator, however, has a strange moment of realization when she says her father misses his enemies. In this moment, the narrator seems to lose much of her childishness, letting it give way to rare understanding. She understands that, after so much suffering, her father feels his life is pointless and purposeless without enemies which he has to fight against. The father describes how he "gave [the SS officer] a purpose in life, he was a dependent on me as I was on him"(46). It seems as though the father needed to see the cruelty of the SS to gain the willpower to survive, and the father's will to survive granted the SS a reason for his cruelty. Now that he is not in danger, he has no more reason to live. The father feels that life is purposeless because the Holocaust has distorted his mind so much he almost needs it.