Introduction

It was sophomore year when I had first heard about the Facing History and Ourselves history elective. My sophomore history teacher, Mrs.Papetti, was trying to get a count of how many current sophomores would be interested in taking this class as a junior, since it was normally only offered to seniors. She explained that this course not only went in depth about certain history topics including the holocaust and various civil rights topics, but also provided a personal aspect. In this class you would be evaluating yourself and the decisions you make and why you make them. She explained it was really an awesome class and the teacher, Mr.Gallagher, took it very seriously and impacted all of his students. History had always been my favorite subject in school so I decided to raise my hand and have my name written down on the list of “interested sophomores” for the Facing History and Ourselves course. Today, I couldn’t be happier that I decided to take this class. Like Mrs. Papetti said a year before, this class incorporates not only in depth history topics but also provides an aspect of learning about yourself. The videos we’ve watched, stories we’ve read, and pictures we’ve held in our hands have truly changed me as a person. After taking this course, it would be a flat out lie for me to say that at times the videos didn’t  make me feel uncomfortable or make me want to run out of the room and forget about everything I had just seen,  because they did, but I know that watching these things has made me a stronger and better person. It’s almost indescribable the emotions and things you learn while taking this class and I believe that what I have learned over the past semester will stick with me forever.

What Facing History Meant to Me

In my opinion, every high school student should have to take the Facing History and Ourselves course.  It is so beneficial not only as a person but especially as a student and young adult. This course  made me step back and take a look at the decisions that I am making as a person. I’ve never been a racist or anti-sematic person but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t witnessed it.  Knowing what I know now makes me have literally zero tolerance for the jokes people make anything racist, especially the holocaust. Of course this class has impacted me positively but at times it made me worry and second guess the person I am. It’s easy, as Mr.Gallagher would say, it sit here today in an air conditioned room with the freedom we have and look at the German people or the sandderkommandos and think “What were they doing?” and “Why would they ever do that?” because we know now how wrong some of their decisions were. I’d like to think that I would have made different decisions, I’d like to think that I would have stood up to the Nazis, I’d like to think a lot of things, but in all honesty, I can never be really sure what I would have done. I don’t think anyone in the class can be one hundred percent sure what decisions they would have made back then to save their own lives and the lives of their family members and it’s a scary thought. For this exact reason, I believe this course is extremely beneficial as a student. We can’t go back and change the past and we certainly can’t sit here and say “Oh I would have never done that” because who knows, maybe we would have, but we can change the future. As a student, this class forces you to relive the horrors of the Holocaust and stresses how important it is that this never occur again. High school students are the future, it is our duty to create the best society we can and what we are taught now will stick with us for the rest of our lives. It’s important to engrain not only the gruesome facts about the Holocaust in our minds but also the moral and ethical side of things. I know that because of this course, I am fulfilling my role as a student and bettering myself as a person.

                One of the great things about this class are the different methods used to show us all aspects of the holocaust and also give us an opportunity to voice our opinion. The final movie we watched, the liberation of the death camps, was the most powerful movie we watched. Many times during the movie I caught myself with my jaw hanging open, absolutely appalled at what I was seeing. It was almost hard for me to register that these were actual people I was seeing being pulled from their graves or stacked in a dirty old wood shed.  These were actual, real life people, not just dummies like used in the other movies, but real life Jewish, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, American people that were rotting on the screen in front of me. Not only the dead bodies shocked me, but the condition of the living prisoners also horrified me. I have never seen anyone so skinny and emaciated in my entire life and it brought tears to my eyes when I saw the old man crying tears of happiness over a small bowl of soup, his first real meal in months.  The images I saw in this movie are burned in my memory and to date, are the most disturbing images I have ever seen. Although this movie was horrific to watch, I understand that it was important my class watched this movie so we could get a little taste for what death in the death camps actually meant.  Another memorable experience for me was when we passed around the pictures of the concentration camps, taken by the Nazis. These pictures were mainly of the unloading of the trains and of the families were taken off the trains. I saw mothers, fathers, toddlers, teenagers, grandparents, and everyone in between being unloaded off these trains. It wasn’t just a few people being unloaded from the trains, it was thousands and thousands of people. Looking at the number of people and the number of train cars, it didn’t seem to add up. There were far too few train cars to comfortably fit the sheer mass of people that were apparently unloaded from the trains. This just made me realize how the entire experience, even before arriving at the concentration camps, was awful. To be packed in a tiny train car with barely any room, for who knows how long, is just another way the Nazis were successful in cruelly torturing the Jewish people. Another one of the photos that really struck a cord with me was the photograph of the gas chambers. In the photograph, there was simply an open door with “Brausebad” written in clean, thick, black writing above it. “Brausebad” is German for “shower”.  This photograph specifically haunted me because in my hands, I was holding a picture, which seemed like just an open door, but really it was the gateway of death for millions of prisoners. It was scary too look in that photo and see space where millions of people died. Up until their last breath, the Jewish people were tricked by the Nazis and it made me feel sick that they could get away with it. The final activity we did in class that  I found was most beneficial was the blogging. After each important video or story we read, we would have the task of blogging our feelings and thoughts on the movie that night. We were free to say everything and anything at all, so long as it was our true feeling on the subject. I found it interesting to read what my class mates had to say and a lot of the times I found myself agreeing with them or being exposed to new ideas that I had not thought of myself.  This was definitely and important part of the Facing History and Ourselves and I am glad Mr. Gallagher insisted on us doing it.

                 I know this class not only impacted myself, but also every single other one of my classmates. It has been a semester that I will never forget and the lessons I learned, I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Thank you Mr. Gallagher for making this a once in a life time opportunity and I hope this class will continue to be offered at Westborough Public Schools for years to come.

Works Cited

Works Cited

Barracks. Google Images. Online Images. 23 May 2012.

Brausebad. Google Images. Online Images. 23 May 2012.

Nazi Germany Map. Google Images. Online Images. 23 May 2012.

Prisoners of Concentration Camp. Google Images. Online Images. 23 May 2012.