Flowers in the Gutter

” Flowers in the Gutter” by K.R Gaddy. This book is what people would like if they had an interest in WW2 Holocaust and the Nazi’s influence. This book is about three communist teenagers during WW2, their families were ruined by the war. Then they made up a group called the Edelweiss Pirates. This book is based on the idea that: juveniles can also resist negative impact and no matter how long the time is, the inner core beliefs will never change.

In this page,  I copied down the main questions of themes, and I answered them while reading my book. Then with the answers I got from the questions, I made my 2 central ideas at the bottom of the page. These central ideas helped me later understand the book more.

On this page, I listed out the elements of a story in this book. These elements I listed helped me in my understanding of the book’s change of settings. The setting was in Cologne, but there were different places. In the train station, Gertrud and her friends were meeting in secret by hugging each other at the station and looking like fake couples. They would speak in a low voice when they hugged.

On this page, I made connections on how the issues in this book connect to different parts of this book. For example, discrimination is connected to communists because communists were segregated from the Nazis, and people didn’t like them. Another example is poverty, it is connected to Jewish people getting robbed by the Nazis, and having nothing left.

On this page, I found a page in the book, where the Edelweiss pirates were trying to escape Germany, and they got caught at the border, and there was a lot of chaos. So, due to the fact that the pirates wanted to escape Germany, they created a lot of chaos.

On this page, I re-read a confusing part and asked two questions. These two questions helped me in making more connections. At first, I didn’t know what was “Soon you’ll be under the grass”. Then I asked myself and found out that it means being in hell, or torture. Because when Jean wasn’t in prison, he was on top of the grass, playing with his friends. Climbing hills, and singing songs. But when he is in prison, it’s like hell and torture.

On this page, I chose a part of my book and tried to research more about the background. I found out that the prisons would make fake consumptions about your beliefs and beat you to death if you didn’t say some kind of secret about your beliefs, even if you were on the Nazi’s side.