Facing History and Ourselves is a course that, personally think, everyone should take as a high school student. Many of the content we learn today in school help us survive in the outside world, but it does not help us discover who we are and what our personality is like. This course helps us do that by introducing the horrors of the Holocaust and the choices many victims had to make. The course introduces us to many different sources of from the Holocaust era, including readings from historians, and Holocaust survivors. It also introduces many movies about the Holocaust that include documentaries and movies based on true stories. The images you will see in these readings and movies will be extremely difficult and hard to watch. However, they will become imprinted onto your mind forever and will help you discover your inner self. I chose to take the course because I wanted to know more about the Holocaust. I knew that it was one of the worst human crimes ever committed, but I did not know the details, like how Hitler came into power, why did the Nazis persecute the Jews, and how the Jews were treated in the concentration camps. The content I learned was extremely helpful in my understanding of Holocaust and especially, genocide, one of the worst human crimes that one could commit. I first heard about the course from a friend who had taken it in his senior year, and found it very interesting. I am currently a junior taking this course, but I believe that it should be open to everyone in the school. I hope that it will reach out to every single person in the school and help them discover who they are.
Friday, January 13, 2012
What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me
Facing History and Ourselves was a course that I had never heard about when I was a freshman or even a sophomore. At the end of my sophomore year, however, I chose to take the course because, honestly, I thought it could be a free class with a chance to earn a good grade without doing anything. However, the topics that I learned in the course, including the Holocaust, will stick with me way into my future. The course taught me to appreciate all people in the world, and to think about what I say to others before the words come tumbling out of my mouth without any control. It also taught me to stop wrongdoings in the world; too many people in the world today are bystanders, watching, talking, but not doing anything about whatever it is they are so riled up about. This course will teach every single person in the world to appreciate people for what they are unique for.
What is the Holocaust? Today, many people might answer that is was the systematic extermination of the Jewish race by the Nazis during World War II. This was how I viewed the Holocaust before I took this course. I now realize that it was much more than just people killing other people. It was an event in which all morals, lessons, and beliefs of a human being were thrown into darkness. It is easy to say in the twenty-first century that the Nazis were brutal killing machines, and to a point, that is true. However, it takes massive brainwashing projects to make believe that a particular race is responsible for all the ills of the world. Germany, after the First World War, was forced to pay large war reparations to many countries, including France. The economy was suffering, the country’s military was reduced drastically, and the people, already without morale because of the loss of the war, were again made to suffer by the League of Nations. Under these conditions, it was easy for the Germans to blame the Jews for all their problems, particularly after Hitler convinced them that the Jews were solely responsible. The Jews had been in Germany for generations and had taken jobs that rightfully, at least in the eyes of the Germans, belonged to native-born Germans. All of these conditions led the Nazis to come into power and for Adolf Hitler to install massive extermination camps, like Auschwitz.
I always wondered what went on inside these extermination camps. I knew that Jews were being killed, but I did not know how the Germans treated the ones that were not exterminated. The images I saw in this course of the concentration camps were horrifying. However, the question I wanted an answer for was how could the German citizens approve of this? How did human beings get the motivation to put down a different race, to the point that they were reduced to nothing more than animals? A documentary answered all these questions. “Nazis: A Warning From History” showed how the Germans were completely brainwashed. They hailed Adolf Hitler, as if he was some kind of God. One particular scene in the documentary was when Hitler gives a speech in front of hundreds of thousands young boys that were part of the Hitler Youth Movement. The boys were very passionate when they saw Hitler arrive, and hailed him as if he was the savior of Germany. They clapped and cheered about everything he said, no matter how racist or hateful his speeches were. I then understood how one person, a person driven by his own hatred of a group of people, won over a whole country, because people did not think for themselves. All they thought was that here comes a person that is in power, and we will follow him because he has all the power and we do not. This was when I learned my first lesson: follow your own course of mind. I knew then that the best path to follow is one that you carve out yourself, not listen to some delusive lunatic who proposed to kill 6 million people.
The next question I wanted an answer for was how did the Germans have the nerve to kill innocent people? They did not spare anyone, including little kids. I cannot even imagine the horrors that kids my age and younger had to face in the concentration camps. The SS officers running the camp covered up their gas chambers by installing fake shower heads and pipes to make it seem like a shower. They convinced the Jews that they had to remove their clothes and step into the showers to “disinfect” themselves before setting foot into the camp. Little did they know that they were just moments away from getting gassed. I looked at the many documentaries on this and was simply horrified. Human beings being herded into the rooms like cattle, and then being exposed to toxic gas without any warning, with no way to escape, was too much to bear. At one point, I had to cover my ears during “The Grey Zone”, because the sound of the people inside banging on the doors and screaming for help was unbearable to me. It really affected me very much, and the fact that fellow human beings would do this to their own kind is sickening. The adult getting gassed is worse enough, but the little children who were also the victims are really sickening. The Nazis did not spare anyone; they were brainwashed to the point where nothing seemed wrong to them. “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” was extremely hard to watch in the end. The two boys, who do not know what is going on in the camps and who only, want to play with each other, end up getting gassed. It was really horrific to see eight year olds and younger, who are merrily skipping along and playing and running around, be taken into the gas chambers, stripped off their clothes, and exposed to gas without even knowing what is happening to them. This movie taught me to value human life, and make choices that better the world as a whole, not just one person.
This course taught me a lot about myself and what kind of a person I was. By making me think about what I would have done if I was put in the Holocaust. I understand now that doing nothing is just as worse as taking part in the crime. For the first time, I felt what is was like to be a bystander, and the anger I felt at not being able to do anything, or at people who could have done something, but did not, was tremendous. This course taught me to defend myself, and others from words or messages that put either one down. Like the bear in the story we read at the beginning of the course that kept accepting what others said to him, I will strive to be the opposite, and become a responsible person, for me and to others.
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