Writing Prompts - Alexander Savranskiy
Prompt 1
After the Ukraine was occupied by Germany, thousands of Ukrainian citizens volunteered to help the Nazis. Alexander Savranskiy notes the following:
A couple of days after the Romanian and German soldiers came in, they organized [a] volunteer army from the local people. This is [was]the first time I faced antisemitism.
Write an essay summarizing and analyzing how Savranskiy's neighbors would be motivated or deterred from volunteering to aid the Germans. Be sure to cite strong and thorough evidence from his video to support your analysis.
Prompt 2
In his book The Boy on the Wooden Box, author and Holocaust survivor Leon Leyson describes his difficulty describing starvation in the ghetto:
I remember once shortly after we were settled in Los Angeles, I tried to describe to a neighbor what it was like to be starving in a ghetto. When I said we never had enough to eat, he responded, "We had rationing here too." He had no clue of the difference between what he had experienced in having only small quantities of butter and meat during the war and what I had experienced scrounging through garbage searching for a potato peel.
Leyson, Leon. The Boy on the Wooden Box. New York: Atheneum, 2013. Print.
In the Tomashpol Ghetto, Alexander Savranskiys most vivid memories were "Hunger, cold, and death of the very close... We needed sugar. We needed nutrition. We were eating potato peels and beet peelings."
Write an essay that compares and contrasts these experiences in a ghetto with other survivor accounts of life in other ghettos. Be sure to cite strong and thorough evidence from both sources to support your argument.