No news from Auschwitz” by A.M. Rosenthal.

An essay “No news from Auschwitz’ was written by A.M. Rosenthal.

This essay is about the Konzentrationslager Auschwitz in our time. Nowadays, this place looks very peaceful, that it is hard to imagine those terrible things which were there about some decades ago. Nowadays, the excursions take place here, but tourists cannot look at this place long.

This essay is informal and highly personal. The author titled his essay “No news for Auschwitz” and repeats the same idea during the story (there is no news to report about Auschwitz.) He was forced to write an essay. And it was a hard task for him.

The message that the author tries to convey is that the place which was one of the most terrible places on the world became the peaceful and ideal nook where the trees are growing and the children are playing. He compares the past and the present, the death and the life.

The author begins with the description of nature. (The sun was bright and warm, the rows of graceful poplars were lovely to look upon and on the grass near the gates children played.) This description creates emotional effect. The contrast between awful days of Konzentrationslager and peaceful time nowadays cannot leave the reader indifferent. The author displays this contrast through the use appropriate vocabulary (it all seemed frighteningly wrong, as in a nightmare, that at Brzezinka the sun should ever shine or that there should be light and greenness and the sound of young laughter.)

There is statistical data about Brzezinka and Oswiecim. The author gives the details and historical events which make the essay like an article.

As far as vocabulary is concerned, the author used a great many words with negative connotation (grievous, torture, strangling), key words (Konzentrationslager, dungeon, extermination). The author used metaphors (factory of torture, batch of prisoners was herded), metonymy (the experiments on living bodies). These devices increase the emotional effect and depressing atmosphere.

As far as syntax is concerned, the author uses parallel constructions (There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz…).

This essay is informal. The author uses a piece of narration. He describes the tourists and the excursion. The guide should not even make a comment to what they see (there is nothing much for him to say after he has pointed.) The tourist looked at the gas chambers, the furnaces, the barracks and they were happy when the room, where sterilization experiments were carried out, was locked. The tourists walked along the wall of photographs and one drew their attention. It was girl of 22 y.o.. The rhetorical question was raised (What was the thought that passed through her young mind and is now her memorial on the wall of the dead at Auschwitz?)

The author uses an oxymoron to emphasize how petrified the visitors were (One visitor opened his mouth in a silent scream).

The climax arrived when the tourists could not look at this any amore (The visitors look pleadingly at each other and say to the guide, “Enough”.)

The end of the essay comes to the beginning (It was a sunny day and the trees were green and at the gates the children played). The frame composition was used to reach the emotional effect.

Analysis.

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