How can one forgive after a painful suffering of discrimination?
According to Elie Wiesal in “The Watch”, he goes through a journey of forgiveness 20 years after the survival of the holocaust. He reflects back on a memory of a watch he received as a gift from his parents on his bar mitzvah, and decides to return to the home in which he buried the watch. Once he arrives, he slowly gains the desire to see it, and digs it up with questions running through his mind, “[could] this object be my gift, my pride? My past? Covered with dirt and rust” (page 4), symbolizing what he expereinced with the holocaust and how it had affected him. As he quickly stuff the watch into his jacket, he began walking down the street, but decides to go back, “[placing] the watch back into its box, close the cover, and my first gift once more takes refuge deep inside the hole” (page 5). When he reburies the watch, it’s symbolizing him trying to forgive and forget by having the courage to revisit his past, acknowledging what happened 20 years ago, and also to let himself know that it is time to move on.
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