Who is rudy steiner?

• Ideal hilter looks/ the ideal aryan
• poor
• wants a kiss from liesel
• looks up to jesse owens
• fair
• hates hitler
• loves to win and achieve highley
• works hard/ is driven
• large family – six siblings
• doesn’t understand hitler and the nazis view
• dies aged 14 during an air raid
• likes sports
• respects hard work

Rudy represented justice and free will in the book thief, from the very start if the book he was a very outgoing and driven character, he has the appearance of the ideal nazi vision by hitler but inside is the opposite, hitler sees an ideal race where everyone is the same, rudy sees no colours, everyone is equal, he respects people who are skillful, we see this during the jesse owens incident, he has great respect for jesse owens because jesse owens is the fastest runner in the world, hitler hates this because in his mind aryan is the master race and therefore should be best at everything, Rudy once painted himself black using charcoal to try to be jesse owens and went to the running track to run the 100m sprint, he being an uneducated child saw nothing wrong with that, in his mind he was just trying to be his role model like many kids do today, wearing there favourite sport stars shirt or having posters on there wall. When his dad found him at the track he was outrages telling rudy that this was very bad and could have brought their family a lot of harm, rudy of course did not understand what he did wrong and why the nazi’s thought the way they did about other races

his apearance was both a curse and advantage at the time, it caused him to get recruited by nazi youth but i think if he did not look like he did he would have got in a lot more trouble.

he significant in this text because he represents free will and justice, we see this