Blog Post #5-DUE October 24, 2018
For your final blog post, reflect on the totality of your experience studying the Holocaust. How has learning and reading about genocide over the past few weeks changed you? How do you perceive humanity and/or history differently now? What will you take away from this unit? In what ways can we bear witness? In your response, you must reference Night, especially Wiesel’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, as well as at least one other text we have studied (“Buna,” One Survivor Remembers, Life is Beautiful, the above article, your visit to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum). For this post, you don't need to use textual evidence, but you do need to reflect in a thoughtful and specific way.
ReplyDeleteIn the Holocaust unit we read Night and we went to the Holocaust Museum. I learned a lot more about the camps and how the people in the camps were treated. It was a very sad unit but it was a learning experience.
I think that I changed in the way I look at current events. I see so many similarities between now and almost 100 years ago. People don’t seem to care as much about the Holocaust anymore because they don’t want to be saddened by the terror, even though we are almost living in something very similar. History is repeating itself history isn’t history anymore it's a reality.
Elie Wiesel’s acceptance speech was riveting. He talked as if he was telling his younger self that everything turned out alright. He said he couldn’t speak for all that lost their lives, but that it is their award. A survivor's award, a child’s award, a Jewish person’s award. It was an award for everyone. Not just him, he was honored with the award because he told his story and the story of others around him. He showed everyone that he was a survivor and that he was stronger because of it. He wrote a book about his experiences because he knew that the world needs to read his book because it's life changing.
We watched videos of some survivors telling their story. How they survived and how they lived to tell their story. Some of the stories didn’t even seem real. It was like I was in a real life nightmare, it didn’t seem like it was something that could happen to anyone. We also watched Life is Beautiful where a father is trying to make things better for his son in a camp. He makes it a game for his son where if they win 1000 points they get to leave and the son will get a real tank. He made everything better and came up with reasons why things were happening in the camp. He did everything for his family so they could survive the Holocaust.
We learned a lot over the course of a few weeks about the Holocaust and how not many people knew what was going on. Nobody imagined the horrors until it happened to them. Nazis didn’t make it a secret that they hated the Jewish people. Other countries in Europe saw what was going on but didn’t think it was their place to help or they just didn’t want to. But here in the U.S. we were recovering from the Great Depression and we didn’t really go to help until we were brought in.
The Holocaust was a tragedy and we need to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
At the beginning of this unit I didn’t know exactly what happened in the Holocaust. I new the basic summary of it- Jews get kidnapped by the Germans and are torchered until their death. Now I have an incredibly more described, more literal, terrible understanding of what really happened. At the Holocaust museum as we went down to different levels of horrible unbearable information. I heard stories about how it happened from viewers, the emotional aspects received from those who were directly involved. The Nazi Party and Hitler, were just so diluted and frozen to what was really happening to the Jewish people. When I first started reading Night, I didn’t completely understand what I was getting myself into. To here from the perspective of Elie Wiesel was very breathtaking. He takes a gruesome story and then makes it more brutal. He describes the event as if he is reliving it. I cannot imagine waking every single day thinking about the torture that I would have gone through just for being myself. It tore me apart to imagine being a little girl in this situation and to watch my mom go off and work all day and maybe they don’t come back. It gets to the point where I would lose hope as well in this situation and wonder if this was going to be my life. What I have observed and learned about has made me so much more grateful for what I have. It scares me to think that one day I have what I have and the next, it’s gone. I love the way as well as the process that I learned about this event. First learning the basic understanding of what happened, then reading from the perspective of a person who witnessed and was part of it, then going to the museum and observing how it happened and every detail from start to finish, and last but not least, I learned what the point of this unit was. I realized that the point of this unit was not to learn and be sad, but to learn that it should never happen again and to never forget it.
ReplyDeleteI thought my experience surrounding the Holocaust so far, has been good. The subject has affected me more so than most other subjects we have studied with a couple exceptions. It changed the way I say the world a bit. It didn't change the way I saw people, it just made me more bitter because I realized the world really hasn't changed. People still are racist and anti-semitic they just commit abuse a more legal and subtle way. There is still systematic racism and sexism. And for some reason people still believe that the Nazis were right, (I know it's not the majority, I still just don't know why someone would do that). As for Night, the book was just really draining to read for me. I think the saddest part of the book was Wiesel's Nobel peace prize acceptance speech. He still felt so much regret and anguish over his experiences that it hurt to read. The movies we watched made all the experiences do much more real. The visuals were terrifying. I think the Life is Beautiful made me the most emotional because you watch a tiny child whisked away into a concentration camp and watch all the hope slowly leave the father. The only thing we can do now is prevent it from happening.
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ReplyDeleteLearning and reading about the Holocaust this past month has been pretty depressing. I almost wish I didn’t know all about like I do now but it’s good to know. It’s interesting but at the same time extremely sad. It’s unbelievable to me that the Nazis were able to pull something off that was that horrible. I completely understand why most of the people that were going through this did not believe that this was actually happening. If the same thing was happening to me there is no way I would actually believe it. I also now realize how bad some people are in this world and if we don’t pay attention and they gain to much power too quickly some awful things can happen. That’s another reason why we have to learn about this stuff. If no one is informed of our terrible history than it could possibly repeat itself. I would like to hope that something like the holocaust could not happen again but you never know. I really enjoyed watching Life is Beautiful because it was nice to see that even through the worst times of these people's lives that they could still be happy and keep a good attitude.
I have always heard rumors about the Holocaust, various stories and accounts. I have heard from my family, the tales from my ancestors, or the occasional article online. I thought that I knew the gist of the struggles and perils these innocent human beings went through. I have never found myself so clueless, or so oblivious and unempathetic. I had a preconceived notion of what reading the novel “Night” would feel like. I knew it would be sad, and I knew that I had to be respectful because the author had a hard childhood. I was soon to realize that only being aware of that much was the equivalent of being blind. There is so much more to Elie Wiesel’s story, and so much more to the stories of people who have suffered through genocides. I did not realize that being traumatized in a situation such as a genocide can do such horrid things to someone’s body, mind, and soul. The Holocaust destroyed families, caused millions and millions of casualties, and those who were “lucky” enough to survive had to face the awful PTSD and memories that stayed to haunt them until they closed their eyes for good. My perspective of humanity has changed as I have gotten older. Learning about this has changed it even more drastically. When I was younger, I thought everything, and everyone was good. As I started learning about politics, and history, I realized that my naïve statement I had made as a child was very false. You cannot trust just anyone. You cannot trust just anyone to realize that genocide is a crime that needs to be recognized and stopped. You cannot trust anyone to carry out these poor people’s memories, and actively campaign against violence so that we never have to see the Holocaust again. I think that is why Wiesel wrote his memoir. He wrote it so he could not ensure, but at the very least help society. He did not want his great grandchildren to have to relive his experience. And I am incredibly thankful for that gesture.
ReplyDeleteBefore the Holocaust unit, I didn't really know much about the Holocaust. I knew what the Holocaust was but I wasn't really told about the horrible and traumatic experiences people had during that time. I was nervous about reading the book Night because I didn't feel ready for the sensitive material that was in the book. I'm glad we read the book because it gave me an important perspective of a prisoner's life in a working camp. I now understand the horrors of working camps. We also watched the acceptance speech of Elie Wiesel where he explained his experience writing the book. In class, we also watched a video about a woman named Gerda. She was taken on the death march after being in the working camp. After the German soldiers abandoned the women in a factory, Gerda and the women that were still alive were rescued by American troops. An American soldier named Kurt rescued Gerda and helped her back to health. They later fell in love! Kurt was Jewish also but was taken to the US before the Holocaust. When we went to the Holocaust museum, we saw a video about survivors stories and how they lived after the Holocaust ended. Gerda and Kurt were both in that video. We watched the movie Life is Beautiful. It was about a man named Guido who was Jewish. He met a woman named Dora one day at a farm. He kept running into her until he asked her out. They got married and had a son named Giosue(Joshua in the English language). The Italian family was living life to the fullest until the worst thing that had ever happened to them happened. They were taken to a concentration camp. The men in their family were taken because they were Jews. Dora was not Jewish but demanded to get on the train with them. They were split up at the camp. The story ended sadly when Guido was shot and killed while pretending to be a woman to save Dora during the Liberation. Guido makes up stories to keep Giosue safe and happy during their "stay" at the camp. During the Holocaust unit, I learned that some countries in Europe knew about what was happening. I wonder why nobody helped for a while. I'm glad we learned about the Holocaust, as sad as it is because it opened my eyes about society and stereotypes.
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