Alan Armony's Reaction #2

I enjoyed this section of the book much more than the first part. Before I even started reading the second part, I knew two things. I knew that this part was going to be much more interesting and I knew that Hanna Schmitz would come back in to the story. I was right about both. As soon as I learned that the case that Michael was studying had to do with a group of women, I had a feeling one of them was Hanna. What I was not expecting was that in the end we would learn that she was illiterate. This explains why she wasn’t promoted to a better job. This also confuses Michael and what he thinks of Hanna. He feels bad for her knowing that she wasn’t promoted because she couldn’t read and she had to keep this secret for so long, but he also has a distaste for her for helping to kill all these innocent jewish women. The reader also learns that she forced these women to read to her before their deaths. This could have a double understanding as well. Michael feels like she could have been soothing these women before they had to face death or she could have simply been using them to learn how to read and write and then killing them so that they wouldn’t tell her secret. I think that Hanna’s illiteracy is a parallel to the jewish women. These women were simply born into jewish families, they did not choose to be jewish or to be killed like this, surely if they knew they would be killed for being jewish and they had the choice, they would most likely choose not to be jewish. Similarly, Hanna did not choose to be illiterate, she was born into it. Now she is being prosecuted because she was the one looking over these women. She was looking over these women because she had not been promoted and she had not been promoted since she was illiterate. Therefore, she was being prosecuted because she was illiterate. I hope the final part is as interesting as the second.