1.

The theme addressed in this story is should a person let his or her past control them
or should they try to face their past. In the story "The Watch" the survivor says " The
time was late April 1994, In the early morning hours of that particular day, after a
sleepless night, the ghetto was changed into a cemetery and its residents into
gravediggers. We were digging feverishly in the courtyard, the garden, the cellar,
consigning to the earth, temporarily we thought, whatever remained of the belongings
accumulated by several generations, the sorrow, and reward of long years of soil." He
also said " The pain is blinding could this thing, this object, my pride? My past? Covered
with dirt and rust crawling with worms, it is unrecognizable, revolting. Unable to move,
wondering what to do, I remain to stare at it with the disgust one feels for love, betrayed
or a body debased."

2. The role of the main character in the story is how he survived the Holocaust which
contributes to my theme that I decided to choose in question 1 because in the article it
says that " Twenty years later, standing in our garden, in the middle of the night, I
remember the first gift and also the last thing I received from my parents. I am seized by
an irrational, irresistible desire to see it, to see if it is still there in the same spot, and if
defying all laws of probability, it has survived like me by accident, not knowing how or
why. My curiosity becomes an obsession. I think neither my father's money nor my
mother's candlesticks mattered. All that mattered in this town was my gold watch and the
sound of it ticking.