Final Blog Post - Wills

When I started learning about the Holocaust I was relatively familiar with the subject, and I knew it was a terrible thing that had occurred. I knew about the Jews being deported to concentration camps and how the Nazi party also killed people with disabilities or who had a mental illness. The Nazis always seemed to me like terrible people who killed innocent people for no reason and that aspect of my understanding did not change. But what I didn’t know and can never truly know is how the camps affected the people in them and after they were liberated. I never imagined how detrimental and cruel the camps could be, both physically and mentally. It is always upsetting to me when I read or hear a story about the people who survived the Holocaust and when they tell the listener about how they returned to a normal life. The end of the story is always fine, but when they talk about how normal people acted towards them when they first left the camp, it is really stuns me that people don't try to help or pity them. Thankfully, the complete opposite happens in the One Survivor Remembers film. At the end of the film Gerda Weissmann meets a kind American soldier, he is utterly appalled by how she and the other young women had been treated. When she stops to rest, she tells the soldier about a woman who went to get water and when she looked over at her, she thought she had fainted but realized she had in fact died. Weissmann took him to a farm house with dead women children and men on the ground. She said to the soldier, “Noble be man merciful and good” A line of the German poet Goethe. The soldier said that nothing else could describe the scene better, because he never thought something like this would happen. The soldier’s reaction captures exactly how the whole world felt about the Holocaust, sorry and disbelief. In Elie Wiesel's Night, he describes a boy beating up his father because he is crying. The boy is supposed to protect the father, and bring him bread and soup. He threatens the father and tells him that if he doesn't stop crying he won't feed him any longer. This tells the reader just how toxic and violent the camps really were, and after the war this would be considered absurd. When I read that I get the same feeling as I did when watching One Survivor Remembers it’s just indescribable and terrifying. My last point is to touch on Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize Speech. He talks towards my theme in saying that everything from the ghettos to the merciless killing it all happened so mercilessly and suddenly. He describes how terrible and how horrific the entire event was and how we should always remember this,always teach the younger generation about this, and remind them that a such a monstrosity and act of terrorism can never ever happen again.