Final Blog Post - Ava Filipek

I can not really put into words what I have gotten out of our study of the Holocaust. I can try to, but I will not be able to reflect on how much it has affected me. I did a lot of additional research outside of class, and I worked ahead in the course packet as well. But the thing is, I don't know why I am so interested in this. I mean, I'm not Jewish, and I don't know anyone who had relatives who were involved with the Holocaust (not that you have to be Jewish to be interested in the Holocaust, I'm just saying I don't have a direct link to it). I still can not understand why I am so interested in this, but maybe it has to do with a concept that I can not understand. I can not help but think of The Giver by Lois Lowry while I write this. The Giver focuses on the idea of sameness and the Nazis had a concept of a “master race” which had the Germans superior to others because of their race and where they are from. I have ascertained that if we forget these events, then we are disrespecting the memory of everyone in the Holocaust. That's why the Holocaust museum was built, to honor the memory of everyone who perished in the Holocaust. I remember the people who were blowing out candles in the Hall of Remembrance and I remember when I told them that what they were doing was wrong. I remember thinking that those kids were not being taught well, but it is not my place to say how other schools should be teaching their students. This unit matters because people need to understand what happened and why it happened. We will never really know why it happened, there isn't a way to answer that, but we can guess. In Elie Wiesel’s memoir titled Night, events take place that are monstrous. We must honor trauma victims. We should never stop asking questions because if we stop asking questions, we assume that we have an answer, and there is no answer for this. We remember the man behind the Holocaust, but what is more important than the man is the idea. The idea that there is a race that is more important than others. The idea that in order to create sameness, an attempt to eliminate an entire religion is pursued. A man can be touched, spoken to, seen, heard and killed whereas an idea can never die. Since an idea can never die, we must make sure that this atrocity will never happen again. “I want people to know that even when they are surrounded by evil, they can do the right thing. But learning the lessons starts with asking the questions” ~ Alfred Munzer, Holocaust survivor