What the class meant to me

The class Facing History and Ourselves was one of the best classes I have ever had the privilege of taking. It reinforced the knowledge I had previously had on this subject, more so than that, it delved deep into the why’s of the Holocaust. With materials like movies and books, this class started with social impacts, and went further into what had allowed the Nazi Party to take control of Germany, and then how the holocaust was able to happen, while the world watched, but did nothing to stop it. This is what happens when people do not act as civic agents, they turn their heads to atrocities, simply because it does not involve them. They did not stand up and help the weak, and that allowed the Nazi Party to gain control, and allow the Holocaust to occur.

In the book, “The Bear that Wasn’t” there is a bear who falls asleep in a cave, when he wakes; he finds that a factory has been built. He goes to several people in high power, the manager, the CEO. They all tell him that he couldn’t be a bear, “What would a bear be doing in this factory?”. The bear heard this so many times that he himself began to believe that he was a human too. He was being conditioned due to social pressures, those in high power telling him what he is, and eventually it happened enough that he no longer believed himself a bear. The same thing occurred in Nazi Germany, the Nazi party convinced everybody that the Jews were not real people, but animals. With so many people saying the same thing, it was conditioned into German society that the Jewish people were not really human beings at all, but filthy animals that should not take part in any part of their society. This conditioning set into motion the ability for many Germans to commit great atrocities, if the Jews were considered to be animals, morally it would be easier to kill them, or treat them like dirt. This book gave an amazing analogy into how the Jews became Germany’s Scapegoat.

The movie “Sarah’s Key” gave great insight that many nations were happy to cooperate with the Nazi’s. Going so far as to round up the Jewish citizens of their own nations and present them to the Nazi’s on a silver platter. “Sarah’s Key” was about a girl named Sarah, she and her family are taken away by the French police for being Jewish, all except for her brother whom Sarah left locked in the closet of their home. The movie follows Sarah as she is taken to a concentration camp, her escape, and her journey to find her brother. What shocked me was that the French police were not forced to do this, the government did this of its own accord to appease Nazi Germany (didn’t work, was still invaded). I had thought that Poland and France had resisted the Nazi’s at every turn; it shocked me that they had cooperated willingly with the Nazi’s requests.

There were a few in-depth discussions about what we had watched, what we had heard, but one lesson sticks out to me, our lesson on the very core of the Holocaust, the absolutely extreme anti-Semitism, not just from Nazi Germany, but from so many other countries. One case in Cuba stands out to me. The Cuban government had promised safe passage and visas for over 1000 Jewish refugees, when the boats arrived in Cuban ports, the government went back on its promise, and they forced the ship to return to Europe, with all its Jewish passengers still aboard. Even worse than this, was that no country tried to stop the Holocaust in the beginning. The U.S impeded efforts for Jews to get American Visa’s, we could have supported at least 100,000 refugees, but we shut off our ports to the refugees. When the U.S heard of the Holocaust for the first time, they did nothing, casting it away as a crazy rumor that couldn’t be true. Many countries could have done so much more for the holocaust refugees, but instead chose not to, not because they could not support them, but because of one thing, Anti-Semitism.

Works Cited

Stalingrad Propagands, Google.com/images, 1/3/13
Liberation, Google.com/images, 1/3/13
Normandy Landing, Google.com/images, 1/3/13
Col.Staffenburg, Google.com/images, 1/3/13
TheMarch, Google.com/images,  1/3/13
Overwatch, Google.com/images, 1/3/13