-How do one deal with something that caused you a great deal of pain?

-The character of this story goes back to his old home in the mid-sixties, 20 years after the holocaust. He goes back to dig up an old buried object that signifies a lost fragment of time, memories of his old  family. The watch symbolizes time he lost while imprisoned, and what he could have had if he would’ve been successful at avoiding the prison camp. Trying to go back to a time that is long gone is often unsuccessful and it may bring you sadness and depression.

-“The Watch” is a short story written by Ellie Wiesel, a holocaust camp survivor, it is a poem about a holocaust survivor who is going back to his old home, where the story started to find a gold watch, that he hid when Nazis were coming to find him and his family; “my only possession was a watch… And so, I decided to bury it in a dark, deep hole”(1). Later in the book, when he is digging up the watch from his old garden, his; “curiosity becomes obsession”(2). He finds the watch, it’s shiny and beautiful, it is all he hoped, but he needs his pain to be gone, and it isn’t. He thinks to himself; “[I’m] anything but a thief.”(4) “Halfway down the street I am overcome by violent remorse: I have committed my first theft”(4). He returns it, he did not feel like his watch was his anymore, it also did not cause his pain to go away, maybe, it even made it worse. So he goes back and returns the watch. “I tell myself that… I wanted to transform my watch into an instrument of delayed vengeance.”(5) The pain did not go away, but it wasn’t as bad anymore.

-Botond Diosy