Damairus Law

02/17/15

Werz-Orbaugh

Holocaust Experience

Throughout my life my school systems have dedicated a large amount of time teaching

us about the Holocaust. I was first taught in the fifth grade and continued to learn more about it

up to high school.

In the fifth grade they kept it at a limiting amount of information about the Holocaust

since we were still in elementary school so they kept it rather vague. We went over the basics

about how Hitler was a dictator who did not like Jews and would have them put in

concentration camps. They started to make it more personal to us by introducing us to Anne

Frank. She was still older than us but the fact that she was still so young made it harder for us to

rationalize what was happening. We tend to think that because someone is older than us pain

just not as bad to them because they are adults and adults can handle it (even though they are

going through far more suffering than we could even comprehend at the time) , but putting a

young kind face to it help to give us a bit more insight. They told us some of the conditions that

they had to go through with being confined in the camps and being starved. I was foolish at the

time and my first thought was “Yay! No school! And more time to play Game Boy” and I

thought that their hunger was like how I felt a few hours after not eating. This stage of my

learning was more of a brief introduction near the end of the year that I would later build upon

later in life.

In middle school we started learning more about the people that lived in the camps and

even more of the harsh conditions that they live in. We learned more about how Anne Frank

was put into a camp and what she had done before the camps. This year we focused a lot on

breaking the barrier between us and them. We were taught of how they lived lives just like how

we did. They were just your everyday average people with hopes, dreams and fears that were

ripped from their home life and dragged into life threating conditions were their life did not

matter and the people they could have once called friends were now pointing guns at their

heads and considering them less than roaches. We had also read Night by Elie Wiesel. I felt that

this book was probably the first time we had actually got a hint of what the Holocaust is

actually like inside of the camps by actually getting the perspective of someone who had

actually been inside of the camps and had seen how the tragedy was tearing families apart and

how an overly stressful situation could lead people to do things that go against their morals.

High school is when we started doing more research about the Holocaust. We had to do

an activity were we had to pick a person or situation of the Holocaust from a hat and then write

about it. I ended up getting Josef Mengele also known as the Angel of death. I thought it was

kind of creepy seeing the extent that he would go to in preforming his experiments. I wondered

how the small children were able to deal with a man who seemed passive aggressive in the way

he was nice to them one minute and then running experiments on them the next to try and

create an artificial Aryan. We presented what we had learned to the class and we learned more

about the small amount of worth each person was given and how this impacted their personal

lives and economic standings. The part that had disturbed me the most about the process is

that they gave people numbers instead of names to make it easier for the Nazi to kill them so

they would be killing a number and not a person.

The school systems that I have been have all led to me acquiring the knowledge that I

have now about the Holocaust. Though I learned a lot about it in my previous years I hope that

this semester will teach me more about the events that took place with more depth.