They look like us
The author compares the German soldiers as ordinary people who were massacred in the war. The author writes, “During the war when the English radio and the clandestine Press spoke of the massacre of Oradour, we watched the German soldiers walking inoffensively down the street, and would say to ourselves. They look like us. How can they act as they do.”
Empty Abstractions
The author uses a simile to compare resolutions to empty abstractions. The author writes, “They sense that the resolutions they make here in France will when they are faced with an unpredictable crisis, seem like empty abstractions. Alone and over there, they will have to take decisions for France and themselves.”
The simile of a football match
Alleg remembers the youth who sympathized with his sufferings and compared them to a football pitch. “I looked at this youth with sympathetic face, who could talk of the sessions of tortures I had undergone, as if they were a football match he remembered, and could congratulate me without spite as he would a athlete.”
