Daniel's Story

Dehumanization and genocide is the central theme of Daniel’s Story. Without dehumanization, the Nazis can’t systematically kill the Jews. Dehumanization lays the framework for mass murder. The Nazis methodically strip away the humanity of Daniel’s family and the other Jews in Germany. They boycott Jewish shops, organize a night of destruction and violence (Kristallnacht), expel them from professions, and forbid them from sharing the same spaces as Germans. The Jews can’t eat at restaurants or use swimming pools. About Lodz, Daniel says, “The Nazis didn’t even want Jews walking on the same street Christians used, so they built the footbridge over it” (126).

Mr. Schneider, Daniel’s teacher, echoes the dehumanization when he calls Jews an “inferior species” and “a close relative to the vermin in our gutters” (12). The Nazis don’t just cast the Jews as less than Germans, they present them as rats, and people exterminate rats, or, as Daniel puts it, “They are just eradicating a vile species—like cockroaches” (81).

The dehumanization turns Daniel’s best friend, Hans, into his antagonist, and it leads to a fight with the Hitler Youth boys. Daniel says, “[E]verywhere there were posters, exhibits, and articles that described to the German people how terrible Jews were” (16). By marginalizing, isolating, and villainizing the Jews, the Nazis poison their status as people, make their lives expendable, and create the conditions for genocide. Daniel and his family must constantly fight for their humanity and lives, and his story centers on battling genocide—the Holocaust.

The dehumanization is far from 100% effective. Mrs. Werner doesn’t adopt inhuman norms. She tells the Brownshirt outside Joseph’s hardware store, “I walked a long way to get there. I’m ninety years old. Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do!” (8). The Nazi process of uprooting the Jews, moving them to isolated ghettos, and killing them in remote camps indicates that many Germans were uncomfortable with genocide, even if they were afraid to protest. If the German people had fully accepted the dehumanization, the Nazis could have killed Daniel and his family in Frankfurt.

Daniel suspects, “[T]hey knew all along it was wrong” (81). He grapples with why the Germans perpetrated genocide. Maybe some did it for the “love of killing and for the love of power, some because they were simply following orders, orders with which they agreed?” (81). Daniel’s questions correspond to the thesis of the political scientist Daniel Goldhagen in Willing Executioners (1996), which argues that Germans harbored an uncommonly virulent strain of antisemitism that permitted the Holocaust.

Daniel’s questions also connect to the views of historian Raul Hilberg, who presents the Nazis as humans. In The Destruction of European Jews: Student Edition (1985), Hilberg argues that the Nazi death squads that executed hundreds of thousands of Jews were disturbed by their genocidal orders. Hilberg quotes a death squad leader who describes his soldiers as “deeply shaken” and “finished for the rest of their lives” (Hilberg 137). Though Daniel mostly presents Nazis as brutal, he reveals their humanity when he photographs them and their families at Buchenwald. They’re people, and people can do terrifying things.

The narrative also depicts genocide by showing how the Nazis set up a systematic way to exterminate the Jews and other enemies and undesirables. By describing the organization of Auschwitz—the Nazi’s most notorious camp—Carol Matas shows the reader that the Holocaust didn’t happen organically. It was calculated and planned. Matas depicts how the prisoners were killed by having characters discuss the gas chambers and showing piles of corpses to be burned. Daniel escapes the genocide but experiences its destruction in the loss of his family, friends, and fellow prisoners, which allows the reader to find a thread of hope in a story that does not shy away from the horrors of the Holocaust.