Question

To this day I am shaken when I see a child, for behind him I glimpse other children. Starving, terrified, drained, they march without a backward glance toward truth and death—which are perhaps the same. Uncomplaining, unprotesting, asking no one’s pity, it is as if they have had enough of living on a planet so cruel, so vile and so filled with hate that their very innocence has brought their death.

Read the text and study the images from Spiegelman’s Maus.

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Which best describes why Wiesel and Spiegelman include Jewish children in their works?
Both texts point out the innocence and naivete of the children during the Holocaust.
Both texts reveal how the Holocaust altered the lives of families, especially the children.
Both excerpts focus on the children who survived the Holocaust and the generations that followed.
Both excerpts show how the children were sheltered from the horrors of the Holocaust as long as possible.

Answer 1

Both texts point out the innocence and naivete of the children during the Holocaust.

Explanation: Wiesel’s passage emphasizes the children’s helplessness and lost innocence as they “march” starving and terrified; Spiegelman’s images likewise use children to show vulnerability and the moral atrocity visited on the innocent. The other choices (survivors/generations, sheltered from horrors, mainly family alteration) don’t match the primary emphasis on childhood innocence and victimhood.