Introduction to Facing History and Ourselves

Facing History and Ourselves is a course devoted to teaching students the truth about history and ridding of any disbelief that the Holocaust was a myth. The course takes you deep inside the Holocaust and shows you real footage and theatrical versions of the horrors that occurred. It is more of an individual class because you are shown a video or do an activity and are left to think about it on your own. It teaches you to think as an individual and create your own opinion on the topics. The course is designed so that you learn about the economical, government, and social status Germany and the rest of the world are in so that you understand how the Holocaust came to happen. Once you have learned the background you then are shown how the Nazis went about killing and isolating the Jewish race. The movies you watch are graphic and disturbing which is why the class makes on imprint on you. The final movie you watch ties it all together and is by far the most disturbing movie you will watch because it takes you inside the camps with real footage. I think that it is necessary to take this course because it teaches you how any decision you make can affect someone and hopefully you change as a person. To take this course you must be ready to face the truth that lies within history and be able to understand the extremes to which the Holocaust was taken. I encourage all to take this course for it was a life changing course for me.   

What Facing History and Ourselves Meant to Me

Facing History has benefited me more than any course I have taken over the past four years in my high school career. The course had a new perspective of learning that no other class could provide. It gave you time to think about what you had just heard or saw and let it soak in. I feel as though this course will benefit me in college a lot because it was structured like a college course where it is more independent and you are suppose to take what you learned in class and figure out what it means to you. As a person I feel like it changed me completely and makes me think through every little action I take now. Throughout the course the videos shown to us made me think about how our actions can affect the people around us constantly. The Nazis claimed that they did it because a higher power was telling them to do so which was almost understandable when I saw the “The Wave”, but as I continued to see the brutality the Nazis enforced on them I realized that no matter what I would think about an action I am going to do even if a higher power tells me to do so.

              One of the movies that affected me a lot was “The Grey Zone”, which was about a group of Jews who were given special privileges to trick the incoming Jews to enter the gas chambers calmly and run the extermination process. This movie really showed how disturbing the death camps really were and how desperate some people became to live just a little bit longer. The Jews worked at these camps so they could live 4 months longer and were killing their own race to do so. The brutality the Nazis used against them was shocking because they showed absolutely no remorse towards the Jews. I found this movie to be eye opening in a sense that we got to see how things really were and what humans will do to survive. The Nazis would kill anyone who stood in their way including the men who had special privileges because everyone was disposable to them. This movie took you inside the camps and showed the emotion that was there. The scene where the Jewish man realizes they are about to be gassed and not take a shower really affected me because I felt the emotion coming out of it. Those people knew they were about to be killed after that and these Jewish men lying to them now had to look them in the eyes as they walked into those showers.

               Another movie that I affected me was “The Milgram Experiment” which is about a scientist who sees how far he can get people to go when told to shock a person that they don’t know. The Milgram experiment was one of the most effective experiments of all time in my opinion. It shows that by wearing a uniform such as a lab coat that represents power you can influence peoples decisions even if they know it is wrong. These people knew that shocking the student was wrong but they continued anyways because an authoritative figure was there pushing them. I agree that most people would do as the Nazis did if they were given the power, but I also believe that there are humans who would not continue with what the Nazis did because it was on a much larger scale. The Nazis used the power of the military and government to convince the people of Germany that the Jews were a plague among the human race. They were able to push these soldiers to do anything, from shooting a person for saying the wrong thing to exterminating an entire race.

            The final movie that impacted me the most out of any was the last documentary that we watched which was footage from the camps was after being liberated. These camera men literally took you inside the camps and showed you what was truly going on inside of them and proved that what the Nazis were doing was real. The first thing that hit me was looking at the people who had been there and how skinny and run down they looked. These people looked like skeletons and I couldn’t even comprehend how they survived what they were put through. It showed us the conditions they lived in and were forced to work in and it showed me that the Nazis truly treated the Jews like animals. The thing that took the biggest affect on me was the piles of bodies lying around the camp. When you hear the number of people killed at each camp it is shocking, but when you actually see the bodies it changes your whole perspective on things. The piles were taller than me of people who were killed simply because they were born into a certain race. The piles of shoes were also disturbing, because they were over ten feet tall and you know that at one point some person was in those shoes and it could’ve been a child, a baby, or any person that happened to be Jewish.

            Overall this course changed me dramatically because I will always remember these films and I will always think twice about what I am going to do. I think that if I hadn’t taken this course and I was to do the Milgram experiment, that man in the lab coat could have pushed to shock that person a little a bit, but after taking this course no person in a uniform could ever push me to harm another person. I feel confident now that I will be able to make the right decisions in life because I have seen what the wrong decisions can lead to and I could never live with myself if one of my decisions caused something harmful to another. 

    

Works Cited

"Saving Private Ryan." The 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History . Web. 13 Jan 2011. <premiere.com>.

The Nazis - A Warning From History [DVD] [1997] . Web. 13 Jan 2011. <amazon.co.uk>.

The Grey Zone. Web. 13 Jan 2011. <wretch.cc>.

"The Boy in The Striped Pajamas." Film. Web. 13 Jan 2011. <popmatters.com>.

In Fitting Memory: The Art and Politics of Holocaust Memorials. Web. 13 Jan 2011. <www-sul.stanford.edu>.