Have you ever been sent to your room? If you have, chances are you didn’t like it. Being locked up in that room all by yourself, for hours on end, without food, water, and hardly any entertainment can be grueling. Imagine this scene on a much bigger scale: 400,000 people sharing only 27,000 rooms, one slice of bread and butter to eat, and only each other to entertain themselves. And forget hours -- people lived like this for years. This is how Misha in Milkweed and Sarah in Sarah’s Key had to live for quite a big chunk of their lifetime.
Misha and Sarah face a bigger problem than others living in poverty. They are orphans. Misha has no memory of his parents ever existing and Sarah remembers hers very vividly. I think that the authors chose to make them both orphaned because it makes the stories more interesting. If they had parents, they wouldn’t have done some of the things they did. Every night Misha sneakily snuck out of the ghetto to find food for his friends. His parents probably wouldn’t have let him do that even if they were starving to death. Sarah snuck out of the Concentration Camps through a little hole in the buzzing electric fence. If she had her mom or dad with her she might not have ever left for fear she would miss them. They were already gone so she didn’t care. Though not having parents was really hard on the both of them, it did make for two really great stories.
Kids had to deal with a lot of things during both the stories’ time periods. With Sarah and Misha being Jew children, it was a lot harder for them. They were terribly hungry, painfully hurt, really sick, and totally lonely. In the ghetto and Concentration Camps the people starved the Jews because people thought they didn’t deserve to live. Lots of people died from that. All they were served was a rock hard piece of stale bread and a slap of butter. In addition from being starved, lots of people were getting sick and dying from disease. And since so many people were together is such small quarters, the diseases spread very quickly; Almost like when a pen gets into the washer. It gets on all your clothes even though it was only in one pocket. Also, the Nazis were really mean to the Jews and hurt them just for kicks. As you can see, that was a terrible time for Sarah and Misha.
One big difference between Misha and Sarah is the location of their stories. Misha was sent to the Ghetto, and Sarah was sent to the Concentration Camp. The Ghetto is a nasty place where they sent all the Jews to fend for themselves with no food. The Concentration Camps were places they sent Jews so the people could kill them. One place was not worse than the other. They were equally terrible.
If you still think being sent to your room is bad, then you have no heart. Misha and Sarah would think your room is heaven. There might not be anything to do, but at least there is no one in there trying to kill you because you are being who you were meant to be.
