Equality and Opportunity

Theme Analysis

     Train tells the story of six characters and their very different experiences right in the middle of the war. One might think that the only themes in a book about the holocaust are death, evil, and the horrors that people had to endure during World War II. Train appears more complicated and has more layers than just the idea of horror the Nazis produced. Just because you are not given the same opportunities as the people around you, doesn't mean you can’t fight for them. You just have to have the bravery to take the risk.

One example of this theme is the Rosenstrasse protest, where hundreds of Christian women fought for their Jewish husbands to be released from a community center that they were being held at in Berlin in 1943. It mentions that “a Nazi police guard stood at the front of the building had shouted at the crowd. Rather than protesting illegally, the women would be better to divorce their husbands, he had said. Some of the women had jeered. One woman shouted back that she’d tell his mother about his behavior. The woman’s comments had made Ruth feel less frightened.” (254)

Ruth could leave when the officer starts threatening the crowd. She could get frightened but since she took the risk to fight back and surrounded herself with people who make her feel good, she stays and continues protesting. A 15-year-old girl risking her life, fighting back, fully aware of the risk she was taking and brave enough to take it anyway. This shows that Ruth was a brave young girl with strong qualities that will help her go far in life.

     Another example of bravery and risk-taking is when Alex makes the decision to get false papers to leave the country with Marko. Alex makes the choice to leave and takes leadership in his own life when he decides to leave with Marko so a safer place. He knows perfectly well that getting false papers is illegal, which is evident when he says “They both knew they were breaking the law,” referring to the shopkeeper that took his photos and himself. Getting caught with them could get him arrested, or even killed on the spot. He decides that being able to leave the country and practice his religion freely was worth the risk. He took the opportunity he was given, even though it was dangerous.

     Being a minority in this war was incredibly hard without having to take the risks that they did. Some of these risks were a matter of life or death, and you have to be brave enough to take them to survive. Equality was practically non-existent in the Holocaust, which meant many people were stripped of their opportunities, but as we see in this book, it isn’t impossible to find them.