During the Holocaust about three and a half million Jewish people were killed, that is three million people that were of the oldest religion in existence, Judaism. The Jewish faith can be traced back up to 6000 years. There is one common denominator throughout those six thousand years, persecution. The violence and casting out of the Jews did not begin with the Holocaust, anti-semantic actions have been in society for thousands of years, and yet the people of this faith are still present in today's world. To understand why Saul Bellows and Jerzy Kosinski wrote Mr. Sammler's Planet and The Painted Bird, the reader must understand the reality of the suffering inflicted upon the Jewish people. Without this understanding, the themes of cruelty, pain, and hatred that these authors put so fervently into their work will fail to achieve the affect they intended for it to.

Nazi Germany's attack...