7818cr+Whole+by+Whole+Essay

So Many Rules To Remember Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have to remember everything all the time? Like having so many rules you almost couldn't remember them? That's what happened at the concentration camps. There were so many rules to remember, especially in the book //The Devil's Arithmetic. // Some of the rules are the camp rules and others were Rivka's rules. The two sets of rules were meant to help you survive and they both were designed to maintain order. Even though some of their rules were very similar, they were still a lot that were different.

A lot of people Are saying the rules of the camp, like the three fingered lady, the tattooist, the commandant, and Rivka. They repeated some of the same rules like "don't speak unless spoken to." In concentration camps, they try to take your identity away from you. That's why one of the rules was to remember yourself as a number, and not a name. They really needed you to eat because they wanted you to be healthy. You're probably thinking that at concentration camps they want to kill you. Well they do, but they need you to work. They need you to work because they want the prisoners to feel like the Nazis have power of you and control you.

Even though Rivka, another one of the prisoners, said the camp rules, she also said some of her own. One of her rules was that they needed to hide the little kids in the midden. The midden is the garbage dump, and they needed to hide the little kids in there because when the commandant came to the camp, he didn't want little kids there. Rivka also said to never stand next to a Greek. She said this because she wanted them to stay out of trouble. The Greeks at the concentration camps didn't speak the language so they died quicker, and Rivka doesn't want her friends to get into trouble by the Greeks. Her last rule, and the one that seems the most important, is to remember your identity. The camp's rule was to //forget// your identity, but Rivka knows that it is important to remember yourself as a name, not a number. Rivka knows what it is like to lose family members, and she doesn't want Hannah, the main character, to lose the memory of her family.

These are a lot of rules, and you probably wonder how the Jews could remember all of them. The camp rules and Rivka's rules are both very helpful, but they teach you different things. Rivka's rules seem to make more sense on surviving in the concentration camps. It seems like the camps rules were just meant for the soldiers to feel more powerful and the prisoners to not and most of them aren't even reasonable. You would have to follow both sets of rules to do well in the concentration camps, but if you were there, chose which ones are most critical to your survival!

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