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interpret the Text Using Close reading
aCTiViTY 1.3
continued
22 “Gretel hits me sometimes,” said Bruno. “She’s my sister,” he added. “And a Hopeless Case. But soon I’ll be bigger and stronger than she is and she won’t know what’s hit her then.”
23 “Then one day the soldiers all came with huge trucks,” continued Shmuel, who didn’t seem all that interested in Gretel. “And everyone was told to leave the houses. Lots of people didn’t want to and they hid wherever they could find a place but in the end I think they caught everyone. And the trucks took us to a train and the train ...” He hesitated for a moment and bit his lip. Bruno thought he was going to start crying and couldn’t understand why.
24 “The train was horrible,” said Shmuel. “There were too many of us in the carriages for one thing. And there was no air to breathe. And it smelled awful.”
25 “That’s because you all crowded onto one train,” said Bruno, remembering the two trains he had seen at the station when he left Berlin. “When we came here, there was another one on the other side of the platform but no one seemed to see it. That was the one we got. You should have got on it too.”
26 “I don’t think we would have been allowed,” said Shmuel, shaking his head. “We weren’t able to get out of our carriage.”
27 “The door’s at the end,” explained Bruno.
28 “There weren’t any doors,” said Shmuel.
29 “Of course there were doors,” said Bruno with a sigh. “They’re at the end,” he
repeated. “Just past the buffet section.”
30 “There weren’t any doors,” insisted Shmuel. “If there had been, we would have gotten off.”
31 Bruno mumbled something under his breath along the lines of “Of course there were,” but he didn’t say it very loud so Shmuel didn’t hear.
32 “When the train finally stopped,” continued Shmuel, “we were in a very cold place and we all had to walk here.”
33 “We had a car,” said Bruno, out loud now.
34 “And Mama was taken away from us, and Papa and Josef and I were put into the
huts over there and that’s where we’ve been since.”
35 Shmuel looked very sad when he told this story and Bruno didn’t know why; it didn’t seem like such a terrible thing to him, and after all much the same thing happened to him.
36 “Are there many other boys over there?” asked Bruno.
My Notes
Unit 3 • The Challenge to Make a Difference • Part 1: from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas 99
buffet: a counter or table where food is served
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