The Last Night

This extract the ‘last night’ from the book Charlotte Gray is extremely powerful and makes you reminisce about the horrors of the genocide during world war two. Faulks extract is very dark and tense as the gendarmes ‘herd’ the Jews onto the bus like animals for the ‘final solution’. This is particularly astonishing considering the gendarmes are ‘herding’ their own people onto a bus to get exterminated most likely because they are scared they will be shot if they don’t collaborate with the Nazis.
The structure of the extract adds to the power and poignancy. It starts with the Jewish people writing their ‘final message’ in the first paragraph, this gives us the sense of prolepsis. It is emphasised to the reader that the deaths of these innocents is getting ever closer when Faulks writes ‘some wrote with sobbing passion, some with punctilious care’ this shows the innocents were fully aware of what was going to happen to them so they put real care and passion into the last thing they ever wrote knowing they would be judged in the future by people who would read it.
  There is a pivotal moment when the ‘trembling’ ‘buses’ arrived to pick up the Jews and take them to the train station. This quotes personification is particularly flabbergasting because it shows you this whole situation is so evil that even the ‘buses’, machinery is scared. The world had been turned upside down so quickly with no escape for the innocent children. The last word of the poem ‘station’ emphasises their final destination for the un resting souls of the poor innocents.
Another pivotal moment when a ‘baby of few weeks’ gets lifted into the trembling bus this particularly evokes sympathy of the reader because it is a new born innocent baby who has done nothing to be executed.