What are some effects of the holocaust? She walked along the river until a policeman stopped her. It was one o'clock, he said. N
ot the best time to be walking alone by the side of a half-frozen river. He smiled at her, then offered to walk her home. It was the first day of the new year, 1946, eight and a half months after the British tanks had rumbled into Bergen-Belsen. That February, my mother turned twenty-six. It was difficult for strangers to believe that she had ever been a concentration camp inmate. Her face was smooth and round. She wore lipstick and applied mascara to her large dark eyes. She dressed fashionably. But when she looked into the mirror in the mornings before leaving for work, my mother saw a shell, a mannequin who moved and spoke but who bore only a superficial resemblance to her real self. The people closest to her had vanished. She had no proof that they were truly dead. No eyewitnesses had survived to vouch for her husband's death. There was no one living to see her parents die. The lack of confirmation haunted her. At night before she went to sleep and during the day as she stood pinning dresses she wondered if, by some chance, her parents had gotten past the Germans or had crawled out of the mass grave into which they had been shot and were living, old and helpless, somewhere in Poland. What if only one of them had died? What if they had survived and had died of cold or hunger after she had been liberated, while she was in Celle dancing with British officers?
She did not talk to anyone about these things. No one, she thought, wanted to hear them. She woke up in the mornings, went to work, bought groceries, went to the Jewish Community Center and to the housing office like a robot.
23) The author's main purpose in writing this selection is most likely to
A. Inform people about atrocities in the concentration camp
B. Explain the long range effects of a traumatic emotional experience
C. Enlist active participation in refugee affairs
D. Encourage people to prosecute former concentration camp guards
E. Gain sympathy from her readers
A: the answer is not A. there is no mention of concentration camps or any of the details that might have taken place inside one. That does not make A untrue. It just makes it inapplicable as an answer to this question.
B: I believe B to be the answer.
C: The two paragraphs quoted show the anguish created by the war. The reader is not encouraged to do anything but show empathy for the woman who is talked about.
D: Again, there is no mention of this kind of action. The answer is not D.
E: We are asked for more than sympathy. Read choice B to see why.
