If I Shoulddie B4 I Wake
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In the book “If I Die Before I Wake” by Han Nolan a girl named Hilary Burke has been severely injured in a motorcycle accident while riding with her boyfriend, Brad, the leader of a local neo-Nazi gang. The closest hospital is a Jewish hospital and Hilary is taken there, Nazi armband and everything. In a strange twist of fate, Hilary is transported back through flashbacks to the German occupation of Poland where she becomes a girl named Chana.
Chana is a young girl who, along with her Polish family, is faced with the horrors of being a Jew in wartime Poland .Hilary sees World War II in the perspective of Chana. The story flips back and forth between Chana and Hilary with one major plot in each girl’s life. Before her accident, Hilary helped out with her friends to kidnap her Jewish neighbor, Simon, and they stuffed him in a gym locker at school. There is a large search underway to find him. While Hilary thinks treating the Jews differently is funny, she has to live in the eyes of a Jewish person while she flashes back into Chana’s time. In Chana’s story she goes through the full horror of being Jewish under Nazi rule which includes the complete breaking down of her family, the horrors of the Lodz ghetto, and ultimately the suffering of Auschwitz. Meanwhile, Hilary and her mother don’t have the best bond. Yet Hilary’s mother does all she can to help nurse her back to stable heath, and she sits by her side the whole time while she is at the Jewish hospital. Even when there was a horrible fire at the hospital, Hilary’s mother stays with her.
Throughout this book, Hilary realizes how wrong she was treating Jews. Chana shows her what it was like to be her during hard times. Towards the end of the book Hilary learns to treat Jews in a better way. By Being Chana, Hilary lives as a Jew and sees how it was like to be treated poorly. She witnessed almost all of Chana’s family and friends getting killed, and she saw Word War II in front of her very eyes. In the end Hilary lives throught the hard times both her and Chana went through. She tells her mother where Simon is,