Human beings can do extraordinary things in times of extreme crisis. The Holocaust was a crisis that still haunts us today. A select few survivors of the Holocaust chose to find amazing ways to cope with the horrors of the Nazis’ concentration camps. Elements of Gerda Weissmann Klein’s All But My Life and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful explore the importance of finding ways to cope through performance. In All But My Life, Weissmann Klein describes her use of performance to endure the loss of her friends and family in Polish and Czechoslovakian camps. Similarly, Benigni creates the sad yet heartwarming Life is Beautiful, a story weaving together the love and imagination of a father to ensure his son’s survival. Both the novel and the movie prove …show more content…
In part two of ABML, Gerda’s stay in the Bolkenhain camp is made easier when her friends support her during her sickness, and surprise her during her birthday. She then wishes to lighten the girls’ moods in repayment by putting on a play. Years later, she reflects on the play, saying, “[she remembers] too how pitifully few lived to know the joy of freedom. When [she remembers] the forests of Czechoslovakia, where most of them lie in unmarked graves, [she thanks] God that [she] was able to make them forget. Even now . . . [she feels] humble and grateful. [She knows] that that was the greatest thing [she had] done in [her] life” (141-142). The poignant, yet proud, tone Gerda uses as she looks back on that day reveals just how important she knows it was for the other girls, as well as herself. A silly play may not seem valuable on the surface, but the circumstances surrounding Gerda’s feat increases the impact of what she did. In a time of war and suffering, she finds a way to make the girls, including a Nazi camp supervisor, forget the outside world and allows them to make a brief, yet moving,