Directions: Copy and paste, or write, your rough draft on this document. Have you ever wonder who Louie Zamperini is or what happened in the POW camps? He was a troubled kid but with a lot of hard work he became a 19 year old olympic runner under the influence of his brother, Pete. During his Olympic career World War II broke out and he volunteered to work in the military. One day when he was on a mission, his plane crashed and he was stuck on a raft in the middle of the sea for 47 days.…
Unbroken pgs. 1-80 Louis(Louie) Zamperini’s childhood was way different to a regular childhood. Zamperini was a thief; he stole multiple items from people. Zamperini was really smart as a toddler.…
Louis Zamperini was a juvenile delinquent, 1936 Olympic runner, a bombardier on a B- 24 Libertarian, and a Prisoner of War. Louis zamperini faced many problems in his life and overcame all of them. January 26, 1917 Louis Zamperini was born to Anthony and Louise Zamperini, an Italian family. Louis Zamperini was a badly behaved kid. He started smoking when he was five and started drinking at 8.…
Louie Zamperini lived in Torrance, California. He was born in Olean, New York in January 26, 1917 but his family was from Italy. He had three siblings Pete, Sylvia, and Virginia. Kids gave Louie a hard time at school because he barely spoke English. He was always getting in trouble and began drinking, smoking, and stealing at the age of nine.…
Boom! Another bomb dropped just beside Louie Zamperini and his crewmates. Japan and America were officially at war. The bombardiers gathered their things, hopped into the B-24, and off to Japan they flew. Louie is now going to be the guy every man hopes to be.…
Gerda Weissman Klein never lost hope that her life would get better, even though she went through such a horrible experience. She still has faith in humanity, and even in the terrible conditions of the camps and dealing with the loss of her family, Gerda and her friends manage to still support each other and see the light in everything. “My experience has taught me that all of us have a reservoir of untapped strength that comes to the fore at moments of crisis.” Her story was inspiring and beautifully written and had a great message of the importance of life and…
Unbroken Analysis Throughout childhood, Louie Zamperini was seen by most as troublesome and a nuisance. Very few people ever saw his soft, caring, and helpful side that was common around his immediate family. The community of Torrance, California, where he grew up, often witnessed his wild, rebellious, and reckless side. Louie’s Italian heritage also made him a target for bullies to pick on in addition to his size and build for his age.…
World War II is an event that greatly impacted the world and aided in the push for change on the global level. Millions of soldiers were killed during this terrible time, but it is the countless millions that were imprisoned and murdered that serve as the most severe reminder of these dark days. “Flyboys” by James Bradley follows the progression of WWII, and how the lives of eight young men were cut short as a result of the war. Each of the eight men were taken as prisoners of war, and it is the fate of each of these captured flyboys that depicts an atrocious reality (Bradley, 2003). Their deaths were the result of the breaking of laws that should’ve protected them in their capture.…
“Society was composed of three simple categories: the killers, the victims, and the bystanders,” Elie Wiesel stated in his “The Perils of Indifference” speech given on April 12, 1999, at the White House. In his speech, Wiesel discusses the indifference that the Jewish people experienced during the Holocaust. Weisel was taken by the Nazis in 1944 at the age of 15 and spent about a year in various concentration camps, including Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald. Throughout his time in concentration camps, Elie witnessed the cruelty between strangers, and even sometimes between friends and family. Elie explains to the audience the dangers of being indifferent in “The Perils of Indifference”.…
The story of Louis Zamperini in Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken tells the struggle of the Olympic athlete from being lost at sea for almost two months to being a prisoner of war in multiple camps of Japan. The pain that Louie experienced was not all physical. The veteran’s exposure to mental abuse matched equally (possibly even more) to the amounts of beatings he got on a daily basis. After the war Louis suffered from PTSD which eventually lead him into alcoholism. Even though alcoholism is a serious disease, Louis Zamperini quotes that there is one thing worse than alcoholism, hatred.…
In his childhood, Louis Zamperini was an unrecognizable, mischievous, and impractical soul. Zamperini was what some parents would refer to as their continuous “headache”. An everlasting headache, who would always find himself thrown into an act of aggression towards anyone standing in his way. It wasn’t that he was an uncorrectable child, but more-so Zamperini was the needle in a haystack, lost. Ultimately, as a teenager, he channeled his disobedience into running, discovering his stunning talent that led him to the Berlin Olympics.…
In “If I Sleep For an Hour, 30 People Will Die,” Pamela Druckerman tells the story of a man named Adolfo Kaminsky, who Druckerman calls “a hero of World War II,” and urges us to help other like he did. Kaminsky was a skilled forger who created passports from scratch for people on the verge of being arrested and sent to concentration camps. The group mainly worked with urgent cases: children being sent to Drancy, the internment camp for Jews. He hid the kids or smuggled them to Switzerland or Spain. It is estimated that Kaminsky could make thirty blank documents in an hour, but he dared not to sleep when he had work to do, thus his famous quote was born.…
Too often, people do not like to look back on the dark side of what happened in American history, whether it be out of shame, ignorance, or pure boredom. However, Jeanne Wakatuski’s account of what happened behind the fences of Camp Manzanar as a Japanese American girl, as well as the events leading up to her internment, is a page turner. It took Jeanne 25 years to finally be able to talk about Manzanar (x). When she finally decided to write Farewell to Manzanar in 1971, Jeanne W. Houston had simply sat down with her husband and a “tape recorder and an old 1944 yearbook put together at Manzanar High School,” (ix). Though Jeanne’s husband, James D. Houston is the co-author for the book, Jeanne receives most of the recognition for the book’s…
When a horrific tragedy is reported on the news, Americans may feel remorseful, but only temporarily. The thought is quickly pushed out of the mind as they are consumed with other, less important things. Rather than donating to charity, volunteering, or giving aid to the homeless, humanity looks on. This is not a recent development; Americans have been apathetic to tragedies since before World War II. Elie Wiesel, a man who became a human’s rights activist after residing in Buchenwald and Auschwitz for two years at age fifteen, spoke at the White House about The Perils of Indifference during the 1999 Millennium Lecture series.…
Yes, we had very hard times, but looking back positively, we had to go on with our lives’ ” (Gordon). The powerful government enforces a law that Japanese Americans had to move into the camp; nevertheless, there was no reason that any of these students could make the authorities feel dangerous. Still, Japanese American chose to obey and follow what the authorities asked them to do. As a result, they lost their degrees, their jobs, and their property.…