A scene that intrigued me from Fires in the Mirror was “Isaac”. In this scene Letty Cottin Pogrebin tells a story of her uncle Isaac who lived in a concentration camp during World War II and was forced to herd Jews into a gas chamber in order to save his own life. Isaac discovered later that his wife and children were in the gas chamber.
This scene intrigued me because it came right after a scene where Minister Conrad Mohammad described how the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans over hundreds of years is the worst crime in history and that the Holocaust was not nearly as terrible. I think the Isaac scene is a response to the assertion from Mohammad that enslavement of Blacks was a lot worse than the Holocaust and therefore we should feel bad for the blacks, not the Jews.
After I read the Seven Verses monologue by Minister Conrad Mohammad, it made me agree with his argument. After all, slavery persecuted African and African-Americans for hundreds of years while the Holocaust only lasted half a decade. However, after reading the story about Isaac and the Holocaust, I don’t believe in Mohammad’s argument as much. The usage of a personal story to describe the Holocaust evokes the human emotion of empathy and touched me on a much more emotional level than Mohammad’s fact based argument. The image of Isaac going into the gas chamber after the people had died and seeing his wife and children sent shivers up and down my spine.
Your point about being swayed by both interviews is very interesting to me because I had very similar reactions. After reading both interviews I empathized for both sides as you did, and I think that is exactly what Anna wants to happen. She wants to evoke sympathy in this back to back fashion in order to show us that both were terrible events and that people shouldn't try to judge which was worse.
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