Nazi Soldiers Threatening Jews

Introduction

Facing History and Ourselves

            Facing History and Ourselves is becoming a more practiced and well-known course in schools across the country.  Designed to promote a vaster knowledge and appreciation of certain societal issues, the class will force students who are open to it to face themselves and the world around them.  The course will look at racism, prejudice, and bias through certain events including the Civil Rights Movement, World War II, and the Holocaust, and will give students the opportunity to recognize the wrongs of society in the past and make changes to the world in the present and future.  As a current junior attending Westborough High School, I was given the chance to take the course this year.  I had heard from older students who had previously taken it that it was a remarkable, life-changing class, and that I should most definitely take it sometime during my four years in high school.  Honestly, I did not know much about the class when first hearing about it, but I decided that I wanted to take the course after understanding about how much it really affected other people.  Growing up in a small town as a volleyball and tennis varsity athlete, everyone knows each other and everyone else’s business.  I admit that I can sometimes get caught up in the gossip that goes around the school, and it is hard for people not to make judgments about others and talk about them in a negative light.  I do not like how everyone gossips about and judges each other, but the fact that I realized that I do it also made me want to change that about myself.  I had hoped that through this course, it would help me to change the way that I see and act around others.

             

Warsaw Ghetto

Ovens in Auschwitz

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Reflective Essay

What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me

After taking Facing History and Ourselves, I was able to make certain realizations about myself both as a student and as a person.  Throughout the course, we received numerous handouts, watched several empowering movies, and discussed some enlightening documentaries.  These specific facets pertaining to the course helped us to understand how bias, racism, and prejudice in history were responsible for the horrors of certain events such as the Holocaust and the circumstances behind the Civil Rights Movement.  These lessons impacted how I saw myself and also other people around me.  It gave me the opportunity to realize that I had a responsibility to understand what caused some of the tragically memorable historical events, and to make sure that things like that never happened again.  It also presented me with a choice; now that I knew exactly what had happened, it was up to me internally to change who I was as a person and to put that into effect in everyday life. 

One of the benefits that I got out of this course was improving my knowledge about the specific historical events in history that we examined.  As a student, I profited from this class because I gained more detailed information on certain events such as World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, and most importantly, the Holocaust, by taking this course.  In a normal, required history class, we cover all of these topics, but not nearly as in depth as we do in Facing History.  The specifics in what exactly happened were what were really significant to me, so I was able to benefit a lot from the class because I gained more knowledge and insight about certain historical events that I was previously not well-versed and familiar with.  Some of the lessons that we covered that really stuck out to me were when we watched The Grey Zone and learned about the medical experiments that Dr. Josef Mengele performed.  Before watching this movie, I honestly was not that knowledgeable about the Holocaust at all.  I knew the basics, in that it was a horrific time, Jews were extremely mistreated, and that they were sent to concentration and work camps and were executed in the gas chambers.  The Grey Zone helped me to see more into what it was like for Jews at a work camp.  I had no idea that some Jews were put to work to help lead other Jews into the gas chambers, and make them believe that they were just going in for a shower.  I learned that the Nazis made some of the camps, like Auschwitz, look as normal as possible, to disguise the fact that it was a camp to work and execute Jews.   I also learned more about Mengele and his experiments with the two handouts that we received: Mengele’s Children: The Twins of Auschwitz and Medical Experiments of the Holocaust and Nazi Medicine.  I was completely stunned at the fact that Nazis would experiment on Jews with no limits.  They would perform some truly cruel tests, including freezing/hypothermia, where men would sit in a vat of freezing water until their body temperature dropped, sun lamps, where victims were placed under sun lamps so hot that their skin would burn, internal irrigation, where frozen victims would have water heated to a blistering temperature and have it forcefully irrigated into the stomach, bladder, and intestines, and genetic experiments, where they would try to reproduce the Aryan race.  I had no previous knowledge that there were any sorts of tests performed, let alone experimentations this horrific.  I also learned more about how Mengele experimented on twins.  This came up a little in The Grey Zone, but I learned a lot on how he would perform mass transfusions from one twin to another, he would drop or inject chemicals in their eyes in order to fabricate a blue color, he would inject diseases into theme, and he would also perform various surgeries with no anesthesia.  This was appalling to me, and even though it is a terrible thing to read and learn about, it is good for people to know exactly what happened so that something like this will never happen again.

After taking Facing History and Ourselves this semester, I was able to make realizations about myself as a person in general.  There is constant emphasis throughout the class on not being a bystander; that is, standing idly by and watching something happen that you could prevent.  In high school, it can sometimes be hard to speak out against something that most people feel strongly for.  It is not easy to be different, and to voice your own opinion while everyone else is voicing another one.  However, by taking this class, I learned that even though it is not easy, it still must be done.  Through certain lessons, such as the Milgram Experiment and the movie Uprising, I was able to see what being a bystander looks like from an outside perspective and understand that it is not right.  With the Milgram experiment, I thought it was very interesting that some of these people knew it was wrong, but continued anyway.  It definitely relates to high school and everyday life in general because when a population or someone in particular is telling you to do it and that they have to because it is “part of the experiment”, it is difficult to go against it.  I enjoyed watching the experiment though because as an outside perspective watching it, I knew how wrong the whole situation was.  As a third eye, it made me realize that being a bystander is not right, and that I really need to work on feeling confident enough to voice my own opinion.  I also enjoyed the movie Uprising because it showed that being a bystander was not an option for many people during the Holocaust.  If the Jews were to stand by, there would have been less of a chance for them to gain anything during their experiences in the Holocaust.  Overall, I learned that I cannot be a bystander and that as a human being, it is my responsibility to speak out against something that I feel is wrong.

Finally, after taking this class, I was able to change how I saw myself and also how I viewed others.  As a teenage girl in high school, I admit that I can sometimes get caught up in gossip or judgments that others make about certain students in the school.  It is hard not to think something about someone when they do something differently than what you are used to.  Now that I have taken this class, I truly know how wrong it is and will be making a change in how I see the world around me.  When we watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, I  was very upset with how the movie ended, in that Bruno’s family could have done something to save him if they were not so prejudiced against Jews.  Bruno never judged any of the Jewish people that he met; he even befriended one of them who he was with until the end.  The lasting friendship that Bruno had with the boy helped me to realize that when you do not judge someone without knowing them first, you could gain something that you would not have if you had judged them before meeting them.  Bruno never judged his friend, and he was with him until the death.  I learned that people really need to work on not deciding something about a person before even knowing or meeting them.  The documentary on the death camps also helped me to realize this.  This was probably the most powerful movie that we watched, because it showed true and live footage of some of the horrors that occurred during the Holocaust.  It was difficult to see some of the conditions that people were left in, and the dead bodies being bulldozed away because there were so many. All of this happened because of prejudice and racism, which result from critical judgments being made about a certain type of people.  After watching these films and taking the course, I was able to realize that determining an opinion about someone before knowing them is wrong, and that I have to work on it to make myself a better person.

            Facing History and Ourselves is a truly life-changing course.  It is optional in high school, which is disappointing because not all students will have a chance to take it.  In just one short semester of taking this class, I was able to realize who I was as both a student and as a human being.  I became more aware and informed of some of the significant historical events that have occurred, I ascertained that I cannot be a bystander, and I also learned that I have to have a more open mind.  This course has changed the way that I think and act around others, and I believe that it has the same effect on everyone who takes this course.  Some people may not be hugely affected by the lessons that we learn, but everyone should be given the same opportunity as I had in order to help make a better person out of themselves and to help make the world a better place to live in.

Jewish Kids in the Work Camp