Search

During World War II, a young German girl, Rose Blanche, inadvertently discovers a concentration camp not far from her town. She travels there frequently, taking food to the children on the other side of the barbed wire and meets a haunted fate the day she discovers the camp is gone.

This short story—an important piece in early American feminist literature—sheds light on 19th century attitudes toward women with physical and mental illness. In this excerpt, the speaker details her bedroom, a place where her husband and doctors come to encourage her to health. Her ailment is vague; the emphasis is on what others—all men—think and say.

The Nuremberg Laws embedded many of the racially based ideological principles held by the Nazi party into written law. The German Reichstag passed this set of laws on September 15, 1935, initiating a period of legal discrimination against those the German government deemed racially inferior. The Reich Citizenship Law is one of the Nuremburg Laws.