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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Often when Milosz sees women walking through the streets of Paris, what does he remember?
(a) A Jewish girl shot while running for her life.
(b) A Polish girl brushing her hair.
(c) His dead wife.
(d) An unknown girl run over by an SS truck.

2. Rather than condemning the four men about whom he writes, how does Milosz open Chapter 8?
(a) Saying the situation was too senseless to see the truth.
(b) Saying they were misguided by their education.
(c) Saying they were victims of historical circumstance
(d) Saying they were enslaved by their ways of thinking.

3. According to Chapter 8, how does communism define the reactionary?
(a) Refuses to agree wholeheartedly with the party.
(b) Acts contrary to party principles.
(c) Reverts to the traditional way of thinking.
(d) Is incapable of seeing how everything is interdependent.

4. How did Gamma express his anti-Semitic views?
(a) Violently.
(b) To anyone who would listen.
(c) Calmly.
(d) Only to the people he trusted.

5. In the concentration camp, what is Beta's job?
(a) Directing Jews to the gas chambers or work.
(b) Unloading Jews from the box-cars.
(c) Removing bodies from the gas chambers.
(d) Rationing food to the prisoners.

Short Answer Questions

1. What kind of mentality do peasants have, according to the state?

2. In the concentration camp, what kind of life does Beta lead?

3. In Russia, what organization did Gamma and several of his friends create?

4. Catholic Communists gradually lose everything except what aspect?

5. Because he believed in earthly salvation, what did Beta argue?

Short Essay Questions

1. How were Beta's stories a fitting insight into his nihilist worldview?

2. Nearly six years of Nazi rule had radically changed people's ideas of private property. Did this help or harm the communist idea of common property?

3. How are the peasants, in several ways, the most helpless class of people?

4. How did Beta's circumstances lead him to a poetry that constantly moved? Why was it restless?

5. How was Delta able to play the game that the center demanded of him--and be better at it?

6. Why is Gamma called "the slave of history"? Whose interests does he serve?

7. Milosz states that the goals of the workers are far different from those of the state. How is this so?

8. Rather than blaming these four men for the choices they made, Milosz says they were slaves to history. How is this true?

9. Under communist rule, education is from a strictly materialistic view. Why is this necessary to maintain proper thought among the citizens?

10. How were Beta and the people of his generation fallen into dark hopelessness?

(see the answer keys)

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