Naloti's Blog: 2012

Facing History is a course that teaches people more about themselves. It shows them decisions and choices that other people have made in different situations such as the holocaust and exposes those who take it to see what happens when no one stands up for the victims of the situation. The course teaches students about racism, prejudice and anti-Semitism. Through movies, pictures and actual footage taken during the holocaust it gives the students civic agency or the ability to have a moral, intellectual and emotional connection to what is being taught. It challenges students to think about what they would do if placed in a situation where dehumanization and severe humiliation of certain groups of people was present. It also teaches importance of standing up for what you think is right. The course shows what happens when racism and prejudices go on without anyone stopping it and how easy it makes it to mass exterminate millions of people. The course does an awesome job teaching about the holocaust. It shows the rise and fall of Hitler’s rule. It also takes those who are in the course inside concentration camps in Europe and shows what went on there. The class is basically a series of films that are shown. They get progressively worse and by the end of them as a student I have seen inside the camps of Nazi Germany, I have seen the Warsaw ghetto. I have seen the Jewish people resist against the Nazis. The one thing in the course I never saw was the Germany people or the Polish people or anyone that was not being persecuted stand up for those who were. Many of them were bystanders but the course also taught me not to judge them because I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes. The course is designed in hopes that the students learn to think about the things they say and do before they do them. It teaches them to stand up for those who are bullied or mistreated because otherwise they are just a bystander. A bystander is exactly like the perpetrator because by not saying anything you are allowing what is happening to happen.

Facing history taught me that my actions and what I say define who I am. It made me understand better how something like the holocaust could have happened. The course helped me understand how important it is to stand up for what I believe in and what I think is right because otherwise who else will. It gave me perspective into the lives of the Jewish people placed into the concentration camps as well as those of different religions who were placed into camps and mass murdered. I also learned that the mentally disabled were the first people to be exterminated. It made me mad that they sent the remains to the family members who had trusted that the Nazis were taking care of the mentally disabled. A lot of what we watched in this course made me mad because of the amount of people in the country who knew about what was going on and did nothing about it.
In the past I have known trivial facts about the holocaust. In school they always ask generic questions like when did Hitler rise to power? Or who did Hitler target in his mass murders? They always tell us that millions of people were murdered by gassing or shot in cold blood, but never once did I really know what made him so popular among his people or how someone like this could take over all of Germany. This course taught me that. It gave me a look into Germany through the eyes of the perpetrators, victims, bystanders, resistance, and rescue. Through civic agency I was able to understand the holocaust as it was about 73 years ago. I was able to make a connection to that time in history and have an emotional response to the awful events that went on during that time.
The course also taught me about prejudiced that exist in the United States. One of the films we watched was called twelve angry. In the film twelve jurors were presented with a case of a young Spanish boy who was accused of murdering his father. There were witnesses in the case who said he did it but the juror could not be quite sure. Many of them started out by making a decision based on prejudices they believe and probably grew up with. The group verdict started out as 11 to 1. Eleven people right off the bat were willing to put this boy to death without even talking it through first. One of the jurors made the decision as if the boy who was being accused wasn’t even human. He said that he wanted to go home and watch the game so this whole thing needed to be quick. From there one of the jurors took charge of the group, he made everyone look at the evidence and analyze it. One by one the whole jury changed their verdict and voted not guilty. This film as a whole shows that people have baggage and they come in with predetermined prejudice but even the most stubborn of people can have a change of heart when someone else sticks up for the right thing instead of being a bystander. This is one of the films that we watched early on in the class that stuck with me. It made me realize anything is possible as long as you stand up for what you believe in.
Another one of the aspects of the course that really stuck with me was the readings we were given about the experimentation that was done on twins. Doctor Mengele would routinely take measurements of the twin’s. He would then do experimentation on them. One of his experiments was with eye color he would take twins that did not have blue eyes and put drops or injections of chemicals into their eyes to see if he could get them to change color. These drops for many would cause severe pain, infections and in some it caused blindness. Another one of the studies Mengele did was inject a disease into one of the twins and when the twin with the disease died he would then kill the other twin so he could compare study the effects of the disease on the twin.
In class we read another article as well. This article had to do with someone the other studies that took place inside the walls of Auschwitz. Experiments such as Freezing and Hypothermia experiments were conducted to stimulate how the army would suffer on the Eastern Front. The Nazis wanted to know what temperature would freeze the victims to death and how they would be able to revive them. In order to figure out what temperature was the death point they would put the victims in icy baths of water or they would put them out in sub-zero weather naked to drop their body temperatures. The way they kept track of the temperatures was by sticking a probe in the rectum of their test subject. They found that most victims died when their body temperature dropped to 25 degrees Celsius. One of the most extreme ways of warming up the victims was by heating water to the point where it would blister skin and inserting it into the stomach, bladder and intestines of their victims. All of the victims who underwent this form of resuscitation died. Another one of the extreme ways the Nazi’s would try to warm their victims was by placing them under a sun lamp. The sun lamps were so hot that they would burn the skin off the victims.
Most of the information I learned in this class was rather upsetting. It seemed as though every day I went to class the films we were watching, the article we were reading or the pictures we were viewing got worse. It kind of makes sense to me in a way why that is because the way the Jewish people or the enemies of the Nazi’s we treated got progressively worse. This class made me see on a bigger scale what can happen when a group of people deems themselves better than everyone else and views everyone below them as rats or cockroaches. It has in many ways has shown me how horrible any form of bullying is whether it is a whole group killing and dehumanizing another group or if it’s just a high school kid picking on the kid that is different they are both the same its just the scale they are on and the amount of time that the bullying and dehumanization is allowed to go on for that makes it more severe. I am glad I took this class because I now know so much more about a part of history that left a bruise on the world.

Naloti's Blog

Gas chamber

Friday, January 13, 2012

Introduction

What Facing History Meant To Me

Work Cited