My Visit to Hell

After the long grueling trip to a place, a land i had never been, crammed into a train car so full no man, woman, or child could catch a breath full enough to satisfy our aching throbbing lungs, and if by some miraculous bout of fate we did manage to take that deep breathe our body was so longing for, we were met with the overwhelming feeling of sickness and death inside our very souls as many a person had died in our cramped dungeon of a train car. Many of these dead were thrown form the train, but it was so full some bodies could not be moved and ended up laying on the ground, people stepping on them while their skin literally melted off their bodies from the intense heat and humidity of the foul urine soaked floor of what we all knew was our hearse to hell.

We did not know exactly where we were going, but in the distance we could see the place, the place everyone was talking about, Auschwitz, the place no one came back from. It was stained black and grey from the utter sense of evil inside this giant tomb, let alone from the thousands of bodies that were incinerated inside the walls of this man made hell.

As we arrived at the gates of hell, the man himself, the one all the people talked about but were scared to utter the name of, for the fear that his total evil would visit them, Mr. Josef Mengele, the angel of death. A name given to him for his methods of sorting the crowd of vermin as they saw us, with his arms outstretched under his clean white lab coat, who many thought was an angel after the brutal, dark conditions of the horrid train car. With his crooked smile, almost buck teeth, and the darkest, deadest eyes i had ever seen, he separated me from my family. Sending them straight to the gas chambers in what was a modern day dungeon, filled with the stench of death and despair. I would never see them again, My fathers bushy brown eyebrows, or my mothers long golden braids, or my little sisters toothless smile she made when ever i told her a joke.

As for me, I was taken into a cold dark room, with what i thought was water all over the floor, but little did i know that it was the pool of clotting blood from the dozens of other test subjects meeting their demise at the hands of the dark, demon like SS surgeons. I was led through this room to a man named Rascher, I had not heard of him, but with his straight black eyes and emotionless face i knew this would not end the way i had wanted, if anything this was ggoing to be the most brutal, aganizing journey to heaven anyone had ever faced. Rascher and the other SS officers took me and striped me of what little clothes i had left and plunged me into a bath of ice water, i could feel my lungs and heart stop, i could smell the ice in the air, and all i could see was white as my eyes glazed over in pain. After 2 hours of the most aganizing pain i had ever felt, they plunged me into a vat of boiling water where i finally met my dimise, but not before i literally felt my heart explode inside my chest with what felt like the force of a thousand handgrenades. Once dead my soul stayed in this place, I seemed to be stuck here i did not know for how long, but I knew id be here until either my fellow prisoners were freed or we were all dead. In my spiritual state i witnessed them cook my body in the very vat they boiled me to death, then strip my skin of body to be make into lampshades in the camp.

The war has long been over, and the prisoners freed, yet my soul is stuck here, here forever, to make sure people know what happened here, and to make sure this will never happen again, to make sure no person ever has to come back to this hell and go through what me and thousands of others had to endure. I hope that this not only never happens here again, but that it never happens anywhere else either, but as i have seen what power, and man can do, I know its only a matter of time.

Synthesis Write

The connection between "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield and the poem "The Winners" is The way they both inscribe winning as a part of life, and that even in defeat you can be the victor if your heart is strong. In "Gates of Fire" the Spartans train almost their whole life, "through pain and loneliness and hate" to ensure the win, ensure the safety of their people, for "the weak are beaten at the start". But you cannot be considered a loser if you have lost for the greater good, or still have faith in your heart, as when the Spartans sent 300 men on a suicide mission to buy time for the rest of Greece to get ready. Although "the road is long, the dream is gone, the fighting heart still carries on" the men marched and fought to their death, but not in vein but for the greater good of all Greece's people. Also the Spartans are trained to "look on life and death as one" and to "drive through fear and doubt and sin". For when they die, their names will go down in history "amid the thin, immortal list", as they did in the after the battle of 300. where not only in actual history, but in the book the whole story is being told to and inscribed by Xerxes, king of the Persians, to always be had and remembered. At the battle of 300 the Spartans formed their lines at the hot gates, where 300 men pushed and fought back thousands of Persian soldiers, For "those only win who reach the gate" and the 300 Spartans were going to fight until the end, never letting up for a second, "with battered prow and shattered sail" they will fight. They have been trained never to give in, to "play their part", and that "this is no life for soul or heart, that breaks or falters at defeat". Another example of never giving up and struggling for the win is when Alexandros and Xio are left in the middle of the bay and have to swim to shore, and "through surf and storm and bitter gale" they make their way never giving up, never accepting defeat. Even for Xio, though he is not spartan he does not give up, even when "the sullen thrusts of fate" leave his hands crippled, destroying his dream of holding a shield and spear and fighting with the Spartans, he overcomes this and finds new ways and new weapons to use, to one day get back at his parents killers. It is quite evident that even though the poem "The Winners" and the novel "Gates of Fire" are so close and have so many connections, the most evident and meaningful connection is that life is full of winning and accomplishments, and that although we may and will lose sometimes, as long as we keep going, it was not a defeat and it will be the thing that is remembered and honored.

Troy Movie Review

Although the movie Troy was a blockbuster smash, they should of found a way to follow the actually writings of the myth, and incorporate them in a way that not only would have been historically accurate but allow the movie to remain such a big hit around the world.
For starters is the time of the actual battles. In the movie they display this war between a great and powerful Greek army with thousands upon thousands of men coming to battle the small (in relation to the Greeks) yet military superior city of troy, which in the movie lasted only a few days of intense battle and military prowess, while in the actual myth the war lasted ten gruelling years of Greeks bombarding the walled city for their taking of king Menelaus's wife Helen.
Another inaccuracy in the movie is how when Paris takes Helen they display Menelaus only going to his brother and getting him to fight along side him to win her back, when in the myth Menelaus had made deals with all Helen's former suitors who he had won over, and had made a deal that if she was taken again that they would all help to get her back. Also an indifference between movie and myth was that in the movie Menelaus was furious and didn't want to win her back for himself but to kill her and showed him as a big brutish ogre of a man, yet in the myth he wanted to go win her back from Paris to have as his wife again, and it does not show him in the myth as an ogre, but more as just a noble who won her over for his looks, charm, and love. Instead of this the movie tells of how he had pretty much taken her by force and she didn't want to be there.
Although I could if i really tried find more inaccuracies in the movie, I am way to lazy and the bell is about to ring, but i hope this has showed the total lack of facts taken from the myth and lets you see the possibility in how even with these facts added, it could have made just as good a movie.