Final Blog Post Ife

Studying the Holocaust is an experience I will never forget. I learned that the Holocaust took place during World War ll and was a time period where a name I will not mention basically brainwashed millions of Nazi sympathizers that Jewish people are the minority and they are lesser than Germans. Jewish people were ripped from their homes forced into concentration camps to work or die. The Nazis killed over 6 million Jews and overall 11 million people during this time period which is appalling. This is important because we can’t forget about the past. In school we are getting taught the past and history for one reason, to not forget. To pass it down from generation to generation. If we forget, we might repeat our mistakes like taking over people’s lands, slavery, the Holocaust and more. I can use the knowledge I learned from the Holocaust in my everyday life by not judging people by their looks or the way they act. Germans discriminated against anyone that didn’t look like them. They didn’t even take the chance to get to know other countries’ cultures or practices. Only due to the fact that they were different, they treated Jewish people as a bottom class. I will not carry the terrible practices that they carried. I will not judge someone because they are different. I will get to know their personality and their culture before I formulate my thoughts on them. In the memoir that I read, Night, Elie Wiesel, his family, and friends were taken from their homes and put into labor camps. His mother and his sisters were separated from Elie and his father. I can’t imagine that happening to me. Years later Elie made a speech and presented it. That speech moved me in many ways, especially when he was talking about his little sister, who was separated from Elie when she was very young. She ended up passing away because she wasn’t old enough to work. The film that impacted me the most was One Survivor Remembers. I remember specifically one part of the film that I won’t forget. Gerda Weissmann was there during the death march, where they forced the prisoners to march for four months straight in the middle of winter. She remembers something her father told her before she was taken. Her father told her to take snow boots with her. She questioned her father because it was the middle of spring. She wore those boots her entire stay at the camps. In the death march girls were dying from the cold and she had her snow boots. That part of the film was intriguing because her father made a decision for his daughter and he thought ahead for her future. She survived and I think it was because she wanted to stay strong and meet up with her family one day. Overall, learning about the Holocaust was an experience I will never forget.