What Facing History and Ourselves Meant To Me
Facing
History and Ourselves is easily the most influential class I have ever
taken and most likely will ever take in my lifetime. This course taught me more than facts about
the Holocaust, it taught me more about myself than I have ever known. After taking the course I have grown as a
student as well as a person. The things
I learned about weren’t just about taking in facts and memorizing them, the
things I learned were essential to my transition into an adult.
As a student I
benefitted from the class in a historical manner. The class provided an in depth history of the
Holocaust that I haven’t gotten in my normal history class. Before coming into the class I thought that
the Holocaust randomly happened and that Hitler randomly came to power and told
everyone to hate the Jewish people.
After progressing through the course I came to find out that I wasn’t
even close. Hitler’s rise to power took
almost 10 years and his idea of ethnic cleansing was a long-term thought. I also realized that almost everything that
Hitler did for the Nazi’s was copied from something else. For example, the Nazi salute is an ancient
Roman salute. The mere strategy of the
Holocaust wasn’t even Hitler’s original idea.
He got it from the Armenian genocide of the late 1910’s. The things I learned solely in a student
state of mind brought great insight to my knowledge spectrum.
As an individual I was totally
changed. I went from a teenage boy who
tolerated others making Jewish jokes into a young man who has zero tolerance
for it now. When I hear others crack a
joke about Jews I automatically think back to what I have learned in the
course. I think back to the struggles
that the Jewish people truly had to go through.
There is nothing funny about the Holocaust and the fact that I even
tolerated the jokes before this course upsets me. This course made me dig deep into my brain as
well as my heart. I began to think of my
actions, and how my actions can affect someone so negatively or so
positively. My moral conscious did a
complete 180 watching the films and documentaries in the course.
One film that we
watched was “Uprising”. The story was about the rebellious
actions of the Jewish population put into the Warsaw ghetto in Poland. Before this course, even this film, I figured
that the Jewish people just let everything happen because they figured they had
no control. After seeing this film I was
shocked to see that the Jewish people rebelled, and that they didn’t just stop
at one attempt. The group that we
followed in the film were non-stop with they’re uprisings. These acts of persistence gave me a whole new
meaning to the idea of not backing down.
There was imminent death in the future of many of these Jewish soldiers,
yet they never gave up. They were
fighting not just for themselves to live another day, but for their entire
culture to keep moving forward. The
amount of respect I gained was incredible.
When I get tired of doing something I often think back to this film and
the events that took place and think to myself, “What if the Jewish people gave
up? How much worse would it have been?”
Usually I’m able to collect myself and persevere through whatever I’m
doing.
A documentary we
watched most recently in the past week was the film containing clips recorded
by the Americans after liberating the concentration camps. Watching this documentary was just hard to
watch in every sense. We had seen the destruction
that the Nazi’s caused through movies and through a few short clips and
pictures here and there but nothing quite like this. When I was sitting in my seat during this I
was absolutely horrified at what the Nazi’s did. I had so much anger built up that I wanted to
jump up and punch the screen. I was
finally able to see exactly what the SS soldiers did to the prisoners. What they did to them as the camps were being
liberated is so disgusting, I was very close to throwing up in class. I had known that the Nazi’s had thought of
the Jews as rats but I can guarantee that they would have treated rats better
than they did the prisoners. The
pictures of the corpses being tossed around like rag dolls and the burnt bodies
everywhere was flat out putrid. The
photos and film that I viewed during this documentary will definitely be seared
into my brain for the rest of my life and I know 110% I will never forget
them.
The most heart-wrenching thing
that I think we watched in class was the film “The Boy in the Striped
Pajamas”. The story is about an 8 year
old boy Brunno, whose father is a Nazi leader, meets Schmule who is in a
concentration camp near Brunno’s house.
The two boys become friends over a short period of time. They became so close that Brunno would sneak
out into the woods and run the camp almost everyday. Obviously as a young boy, Brunno becomes
intrigued with the concentration camp and wants to help Schmule find his father
inside the camp. Brunno eventually
climbs under the barbed wire and is in the camp. Right when he arrives chaos erupts as the prisoners
are being taken to their “showers”. At
about the same time, Brunno’s parents are realizing he is gone and they go on a
hunt and run all the way to the camp. As
we had learned, the showers that the prisoners were going to were not actually
showers and they were the gas chambers.
Witnessing Brunno’s innocent 8 year old body be gassed was one of the
hardest things I have had to watch. The
story made me connect personally to Brunno, which made it so difficult to watch
the death of his young innocence. The
sadness poured out along with the hatred I had for the Nazi’s all at once after
this film.
As a whole, the Facing History and Ourselves course was
the best class I have ever taken. It
made me search my conscious as a human and broadened my knowledge as a
student. For a course to drastically
change you as person and to change your mentality while making any decision is
incredibly difficult to pull off. I
think that this course took that difficult challenge and made it look as easy
as it comes.
This is a picture of
the entrance to the gas chambers that most of the Nazi concentration camps
had. The German word “Brausebad” means
shower.
