Don’t be a Bystander Forgetting to breathe when he hears footsteps outside his cell. The high window that he is not allowed to look out of. The bed made of wooden boards. The tiny amount of bread and water that comes through the slot in the door. This is what it was like for Helmuth in the concentration camp. The Boy who Dared by Susan Campbell Bartoletti is a book based on the story of Helmuth´s life during, and leading up to him being in a concentration camp. Throughout the story, Helmuth sees how much Hitler is hiding from them. Nobody is allowed to do anything that’s not German. Also, he starts to see how the Jews are being treated differently. So, Helmuth illegally listens to a different radio station to get the truth and he makes leaflets with his friends, Karl and Rudi, to give people information about what is really going on with the war. Helmuth gets caught and put in a concentration camp where he later is killed. The Holocaust was a very dark time where people were in need of a hero. …show more content…
In the novel, people would draw the star of David or “Jew” on the doors and windows of stores and when a jewish man tried to clean it off, the Nazis beat him up (Bartoletti 31, 32). Further on in the story, the narrator says, “The executioner comes on tuesday” (Bartoletti 3). This quote is from when Helmuth was in the concentration camp. Later the same tuesday, Helmuth was killed. This kind of discrimination and inhumane treatment shows how cruel Hitler was to the Jews and anyone else that was in a concentration camp. Not only did Jews get brutalized, but also anyone else that didn’t obey Hitler’s