Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

by Laura Hillenbrand

player and prelaw student, built like a side of beef, Cuppernell

These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous.

Only the laundry knew how scared I was.”

There were rarely funerals, for there were rarely bodies. Men were just gone, and that was the end of it.

Though they both knew that they were in an extremely serious situation, both had the ability to warn fear away from their thoughts, focusing instead on how to survive and reassuring themselves that things would work out.

This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness; to be deprived of it is to be dehumanized, to be cleaved from, and cast below, mankind.

Without dignity, identity is erased. In its absence, men are defined not by themselves, but by their captors and the circumstances in which they are forced to live.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty. In places like Kwajalein, degradation could be as lethal as a bullet.

Though the captives’ resistance was dangerous, through such acts, dignity was preserved, and through dignity, life itself.

Louie, covered in everything that a somersault inside an outhouse will slather on a

man,

the central struggle of postwar life was to restore their dignity and find a way to see the world as something other than menacing blackness.

A once singularly hopeful man now believed that his only hope lay in murder.

In seeking the Bird’s death to free himself, Louie had chained himself, once again, to his tyrant.

What God asks of men, said Graham, is faith. His invisibility is the truest test of that

faith.

To know who sees him, God makes hi...

If you will save me, I will serve you forever.

For Louie Zamperini, the war was over.